"Perfectibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... estate was large, and he had greatly increased it in 1770, by marrying a daughter of one of the richest planters in Hayti. Like many other men of his rank at that time, he was an ardent admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a firm believer in the native nobility and general perfectibility of man. He was a very popular landlord, and his generosity was equal to his wealth. During six months of a severe famine he fed the peasants of Montsallier at his own expense. He was one of the believers in Madame de Stael's man of destiny, her father, the Genevese banker, Necker. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the sound. Statesmen, scholars, divines, heroes, poets! Do you want exemplars worthy of study and imitation? Where will you find them brighter than in Scotland? Where can you find them purer than in Scotland? Here, no Solon, indulging imagination, has pictured the perfectibility of man; no Lycurgus, viewing him through the medium of human frailty alone, has left for his government an iron code, graven on eternal adamant; no Plato, dreaming in the luxurious gardens of the Academy, has ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... shall have receded into the past." But if we must feed our moral natures on "baseless fancies," most men will prefer the Christian dogmas of immortality, the infinite capacity of development of the human soul, the brotherhood of the race and its vital union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Surrey; is famous as the author of an "Essay on the Principle of Population," of which the first edition appeared in 1798, and the final, greatly enlarged, in 1803; the publication provoked much hostile criticism, as it propounded a doctrine which was disastrous to the accepted theory of perfectibility, and which aimed at showing how the progress of the race was held in check by the limited supply of the means of subsistence, a doctrine that admittedly anticipated that struggle for life on a larger scale which the Darwinian hypothesis requires for its ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shillings in London, and there were 102. The woods she most preferred were jessamine, rose, and cork. She never smoked cherry-wood pipes, from their weight, and because she liked cheaper ones, which she could renew oftener. She never arrived at that perfectibility, which is seen in many smokers, of swallowing the fumes, or of making them pass out at her nostrils. The pipe was to her what a fan was, or is, in a lady's hand—a means of having something to do. She forgot it when she had a letter to write, or any serious occupation. It is not so with ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... prostration of the great interests of society as has there taken place, and is too well-read a scholar not to know that it was in the institutions of the Byzantine empire that a similar levelling resulted in ancient times. But being thus a devout believer, if not in the doctrine of perfectibility, at least in that of ceaseless progress towards democracy, his opinions are of the highest value when he portrays the perils with which the new order of things is attended. Alone of all the moderns, he has fixed the public attention upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... never become corrupted,—a most barefaced assertion. Have not all nations suffered periods of corruption? This notion, that the whole people cannot err, opens the door for any license. It logically leads to that other idea, of the native majesty of man and the perfectibility of society, which this sophist boldly accepted. Rousseau thought that if society were released from all law and all restraint, the good impulses and good sense of the majority would produce a higher state of virtue and wisdom than what he saw around him, since majorities ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... an intrepid faith in the perfectibility of man. His doctrine was one of non-intervention; that the powerful can afford to be lenient; that mankind continually moves toward the light if not too much interfered with. By his influence the darker shapes of repression ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... ago this apology for error was met by those high-minded and interesting men, the French believers in human perfectibility, with their characteristic dogma,—of which Rousseau was the ardent expounder,—that man is born with a clear and unsophisticated spirit, perfectly able to discern all the simple truths necessary for common conduct by its own unaided light. His motives are all ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... to be dreaded. "They declaim with warmth on the miseries of mankind, the abuses of government, and the vices of rulers; all which they engage to remove, providing their theories should once be adopted. They talk of the perfectibility of man and of the dignity of his nature; and, entirely forgetting what he is, declaim perpetually about what he should be." Of Jacobins there are plenty. They profit by the labors of others; tyrants in power, demagogues when not. Fortunately for ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... institutions of religions faith with the most universal religious toleration; to preserve the rights of all by causing each to respect those of the other; to carry forward every social improvement to the uttermost limit of human perfectibility, by the free action of mind upon mind, not by the obtrusive intervention of misapplied force; to uphold the integrity and guard the limitations of our organic law; to preserve sacred from all touch of usurpation, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
