Alexis Quotes (-375--275)

“In aristocratic societies, enjoyments of the mind are particularly demanded of the sciences; in democratic, those of the body.”

“There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.”

“The most opulent citizens of a democracy will not show tastes very different from those of the people, whether having come from within the people, they really share them, or whether they believe they ought to submit to them.”

“The moral empire of the majority is founded in part of the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in many men united than in one alone, in the number of legislators than in their choice. It is the theory of equality applied to intellects.”

“From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles (100 kilometers) of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.”

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”

“In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.”

“Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts — the cradle of its infancy, and the Divine source of its claims.”

“If the great questions of the beginning of this century were mainly political, those which will convulse the world at its close will be social.”

“In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.”

“From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles (100 kilometers) of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.”

“Nothing is more necessary to the cultivation of the advanced sciences or of the elevated portion of sciences than meditation, and there is nothing less fit for meditation than the interior of a democratic society. One does not encounter there, as in aristocratic peoples, a numerous class that stays at rest because it finds itself well-off and another than does not move because it despairs of being better off. Everyone is agitated: some want to attain power, others to take possession of wealth. In the midst of this universal tumult, the repeated collision of contrary interests, the continual advance of men toward fortune, where does one find the calm necessary to the profound combinations of the intellect? how does each man bring his thought to a stop at such and such a point, when everything moves around him and he himself is carried along and tossed about every day in the impetuous current that swirls all things along?”

“All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.”

“Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.”

“Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.”

“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no other democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”

“Despots themselves don't deny that freedom is a wonderful thing, they only want to limit it to themselves; they argue that everyone else is unworthy of it.”

“Material comforts ... are small, but the soul clings to them: it considers them every day and from very close; in the end they hide the rest of the world from it.”

“Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.”

“The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.”

“John Howard was prime minister and it was a hard time in the indigenous world; it was difficult to know how to deal with what was happening”

“I didn’t find the voices in published literature in Australia that could show me the way...Heaney felt like a mentor I wish I had while I was trying to write.”

“The Complete Works of Pat Parker historicizes Pat Parker's significance to black women's literary traditions, lesbian erotics, to black queer struggles and black feminisms, and to global social justice movements.”

“Of all my reviewers you are, perhaps, the only one who has thoroughly understood me; who has taken a general bird's-eye view of my ideas; who sees their ulterior aim, and yet has preserved a clear perception of the details.”