Necessity Quotes - page 49
Joe Hume talked to me very earnestly about the necessity of an union of Liberals. He said much about Ballot and the Franchise. I told him that I could easily come to some compromise with him and his friends on these matters, but that there were other questions about which I feared that there was an irreconcileable difference, particularly the vital question of national defence. He seemed quite confounded, and had absolutely nothing to say. I am fully determined to make them eat their words on that point, or to have no political connection with them.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
If that really is the last word of civilization, if we are to proceed on the assumption that the nearer the native or any human being comes to a pig the more desirable is his condition, of course I have nothing to say I must continue to believe that, at all events, the progress of the native in civilization will not be secured until he has been convinced of the necessity and the dignity of labour. Therefore, I think that anything we reasonably can do to induce the native to labour is a desirable thing, the existence of the tax is an inducement to him to work.
Joseph Chamberlain
The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity. Reactionary paternalism had in vain tried to resist this necessity. Out of the horrors of Speenhamland men rushed blindly for the shelter of a utopian market economy.
Karl Polanyi
If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination. In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The wisdom and hope that was inherent in McGovern's call that year was not sufficient to defeat Richard Nixon. In a matter of months, however, polls would reveal that Americans regretted their decision, as they came to recognize the extent of Nixon's corruption. Forty years on, McGovern's vision that America might come home to the ideals that had nourished it from the beginning is less a matter of hope than necessity.
George McGovern
Never again, by the necessity of an axiom, will an Englishman live for his country or die for his country: the country for which people live and die was obsolete and we have abolished it. Or not quite yet. No, not yet. The Referendum is not a ‘verdict' after which the prisoner is hanged forthwith. It is no more than provisional... This will be so as long as one Parliament can alter or undo whatever that or any other Parliament has done. Hence those golden words in the Government's Referendum pamphlet: ‘Our continued membership will depend on the continuing assent of Parliament.'
Enoch Powell
The question which the House would have to decide was, whether a system had been created under which all countries might live in that peace which it was the great object of the confederacy to establish. A difference of sentiment on some points of the arrangements could be no impeachment of the wisdom of the whole. Perfection belonged to no work of human beings, even when many years were devoted to it; much less when its completion was accelerated by the necessity of circumstances. On this general principle he applauded and was prepared to maintain the proceedings of the Congress at Vienna.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh
It is not for the candidates, but for the temper shown by the constituencies, that one may grieve, if there be matter for grief in the unmistakable proof which the elections are furnishing, that people do not recognise the necessity of giving supreme political power to supreme political intelligence.
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them wherever need of such control is shown... [Applause] The immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, control of some sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts owe allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign's orders may be enforced. In my opinion, this sovereign must be the National Government.
Theodore Roosevelt
Decadence, instability, disintegration, corruption, reversal of attitude, all that arises through the simple fact of one's going on existing without self-criticism, self-renewal, constant self-adaptation, without letting anything in one die, through the simple fact of gradually settling down in the vantage point one occupies, the good conscience one enjoys. Such is the permanent danger of all spiritual life. It is an inevitable deterioration which can only be overcome-and painfully at that-by a watchful mustering of strength-unless it be effortlessly vanquished by a wonderful gift of grace....Whence the necessity of paradox: or rather the perpetual flavor of paradox that truth has, when it is freshly expressed, for the man who clings to a truth when it is in the process of turning into a lie.
Henri de Lubac
One of Spinoza's most important conclusions is that of the human being's necessity to overcome the contradiction between the finite and the infinite. Spinoza was able to express the very nature of the Judaeo-Christian way of thought and, at the same time, to remain outside it and even negate it. Both in the Jewish and the Christian traditions, God creates the world but is outside it. Spinoza, on the other hand, would not say that God creates the world, but that He produces it – in philosophical terms, He causes it. God, for Spinoza, is not outside the world and this view was the object of very harsh criticism by his contemporaries. The Jewish community in Holland even saw fit to excommunicate him. The God of Judeao-Christian thought, according to Spinoza, is an invention of man, who imagines that God thinks and acts as human beings do.
Baruch Spinoza
...This contrariety between Reason and Necessity, which Spinoza threw out in so strong a light, I, strangely enough, applied to my own being; and what has been said is, properly speaking, only for the purpose of rendering intelligible what follows. [Original in German: Diesen Gegensatz, welchen Spinoza so kräftig heraushebt, wendete ich aber auf mein eignes Wesen sehr wunderlich an, und das Vorhergesagte soll eigentlich nur dazu dienen, um das, was folgt, begreiflich zu machen.].
Baruch Spinoza
It is the natural and correct attitude of mind for each of us to have regard for our own race and the place of our own origin. There is abundant room here for the preservation and development of the many divergent virtues that are characteristic of the different races which have made America their home. They ought to cling to all these virtues and cultivate them tenaciously. It is my own belief that in this land of freedom new arrivals should especially keep up their devotion to religion. Disregarding the need of the individual for a religious life, I feel that there is a more urgent necessity, based on the requirements of good citizenship and the maintenance of our institutions, for devotion to religion in America than anywhere else in the world. One of the greatest dangers that beset those coming to this country, especially those of the younger generation, is that they will fall away from the religion of their fathers, and never become attached to any other faith.
Calvin Coolidge
All of you welfare preachers-it's not unearned money that you're after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I'm a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers . . . it's the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean-the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without . . . the necessity . . . of being.
John Galt
The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!
Helen Keller
To stop the war, besides being a futile gesture, would leave the crisis unresolved. It would postpone the necessity of a solution. Therefore, in a spirit of fatalism (which my opponents are welcome to call a spirit of sadism) I say: Let the war go on. It is the shortest and therefore the best way to replace the capitalist system by a democratic system, and which will at the same time rescind those partial and tyrannical solutions of the crisis represented by the Soviet Union no less than by Germany and Italy.
Herbert Read
At the beginning of my present earthly existence I was put into touch with many people who said they had a great inner aspiration, an urge towards something deeper and truer, but were tied down, subjected, slaves of that brutal necessity of earning their living, and that this weighed down upon them so much, took way so much of their time and energy that they could not engage in any other activity, inner or outer. I heard that very often.
Mirra Alfassa
The word "Diwali" means an arrangement or a row of lights. Traditionally, Diwali is celebrated on the darkest night of the year when the necessity and the beauty of lights can be truly appreciated. Light is a symbol in the world's religions for God, truth and wisdom.
Given the antiquity of India, the diversity of its religious traditions and the interaction among these, it should not surprise us to know that many religious communities celebrate Diwali. Each one offers a distinctive reason for the celebration that enriches its meaning. For every community, however, Diwali celebrates and affirms hope, and the triumph of goodness and justice over evil and injustice. These values define the meaning of Diwali.
Anantanand Rambachan
Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.
Herman Melville
In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.
John Stuart Mill
If it be said, that an Omnipotent Creator, though under no necessity of employing contrivances such as man must use, thought fit to use them in order to leave traces that would enable man to recognize his creative hand, the answer is that this equally implies a limit to his omnipotence. For if he wanted men to know that they themselves and the world are his work, he, being omnipotent, had only to will that they should be aware of it.
John Stuart Mill
