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1.066_-_Prohibition

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1.066_-_Prohibition

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   13 Johann Hari
   8 Milton Friedman
   6 H L Mencken
   5 Mark Twain
   4 Sigmund Freud
   4 Laozi
   4 James Baldwin
   4 Anonymous
   3 Timothy Snyder
   3 Sam Harris
   3 Ren Girard
   3 Pope Benedict XVI
   3 Marcus Tullius Cicero
   3 Libba Bray
   3 Kevin Kelly
   3 H G Wells
   3 Gary Johnson
   3 Fiorello H La Guardia
   3 Daniel Okrent
   3 Bill Bryson

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Prohibition is better than no liquor at all. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove

2:Communism is like prohibition, it is a good idea, but it won't work. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove

3:Funny to watch these Senators switching back and forth on Prohibition. Politics is a great character builder. You have to take a referendum to see what your convictions are for that day. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove

4:All I kin git out o' the Wickersham position on prohibition is that the distinguished jurist seems to feel that if we'd let 'em have it the problem o' keepin' 'em from gitten;' it would be greatly simplified ~ kin-hubbard, @wisdomtrove

5:I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

6:Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove

7:Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove

8:Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove

9:The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

10:All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

11:Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Prohibition is the trigger of crime. ~ Ian Fleming,

2:Prohibition has made nothing but trouble ~ Al Capone,

3:Prohibition was better than no liquor at all. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

4:Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can. ~ Libba Bray,

5:Fidelity--a strong itch with a prohibition to scratch. ~ Julian Tuwim,

6:Every general prohibition creates its bootleggers. ~ Robert A Heinlein,

7:For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground. ~ Jello Biafra,

8:Prohibition didn't work in the Garden of Eden. Adam ate the apple. ~ Vicente Fox,

9:Faithful to the cause of Prohibition - She hath done what she could ~ Carrie Nation,

10:heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme. ~ Johann Hari,

11:One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative. ~ Milton Friedman,

12:90% of the problem with marijuana is prohibition related, not use related. ~ Gary Johnson,

13:Frenchmen drink wine just like we used to drink water before Prohibition. ~ Ring Lardner Jr,

14:The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition. ~ Theodore H White,

15:Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it's against nature. ~ Milton Friedman,

16:prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into ~ Don Marquis,

17:America has maintained a prohibition on negotiating with terrorists for good reason. ~ James Inhofe,

18:Communism is like prohibition: It’s good in theory, but it doesn’t work. That ~ Svetlana Alexievich,

19:Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water. ~ W C Fields,

20:As with most consensual crimes, this prohibition of hemp is both silly and sinister. ~ Peter McWilliams,

21:We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation. ~ William Hazlitt,

22:Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine That cravens my weak hand. ~ William Shakespeare,

23:The prohibition of drugs causes crime. You don't have to legalize, just decriminalize it. ~ Jesse Ventura,

24:Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. ~ Elena Ferrante,

25:A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist. ~ Sam Harris,

26:People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia. ~ Gore Vidal,

27:A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. ~ Abraham Lincoln,

28:We know the IRS has made clear there is no prohibition on releasing it when you're under audit. ~ Hillary Clinton,

29:But the worst handicap we had the prohibition of naming individual units who had done the fighting. ~ Philip Gibbs,

30:In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity. ~ Sinclair Lewis,

31:This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition, and nobody knows where it came from, even now. ~ Johann Hari,

32:The prohibition of L'shon Hara is the Jewish equivalent of the Buddhist practice of Right Speech. ~ Sylvia Boorstein,

33:Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us. ~ Milton Friedman,

34:The snakes are always against the prohibition of the poisons; and the arms traders, of the arms! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan,

35:And yet, prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so extraordinarily profitable. ~ Sam Harris,

36:I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition. ~ Thelonious Monk,

37:Three times I have been mistaken for a prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself. ~ Dashiell Hammett,

38:There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There's a prohibition against taking it away. ~ Alberto Gonzales,

39:Marijuana prohibition is just the stupidest law possible....Jus t legalize it and tax it like we do liquor. ~ Morgan Freeman,

40:Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it. ~ Mark Twain,

41:Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long counterproductive. A ~ Kevin Kelly,

42:You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words. ~ Mary Norris,

43:Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive. ~ Kevin Kelly,

44:I think I understood intuitively that there was no sustenance for me in the religion of explanation and prohibition. ~ Mark Doty,

45:The Prohibition era had been a great source of material for building an excellent science of alcohol intoxication ~ Deborah Blum,

46:The prohibition against preaching is to keep people from organizing into groups to impose their beliefs on others. ~ David Litwack,

47:In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstances. ~ Pope Benedict XVI,

48:By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition. ~ Bill Bryson,

49:The war on drugs is identical to the prohibition of alcohol: all you're doing is making criminals rich and powerful. ~ Jesse Ventura,

50:On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. ~ Charles Dickens,

51:When God became human, He made Himself into an image. By His own incarnation, He shattered the prohibition against art. ~ Ian Caldwell,

52:The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, because it needs them. So long as it lives, they live. ~ Johann Hari,

53:So glistered the dire Snake , and into fraud Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the Tree Of Prohibition, root of all our woe. ~ John Milton,

54:When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear. ~ Ron Paul,

55:Historically the interesting question is when and why did the prohibition on eating beef become the requirement of a good Hindu. ~ Romila Thapar,

56:It is impossible to tell whether prohibition is a good thing or a bad thing. It has never been enforced in this country. ~ Fiorello H La Guardia,

57:God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,

58:All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space ~ Arthur Miller,

59:We need a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition. ~ Bertrand Russell,

60:After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression. ~ Dave Barry,

61:Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures. ~ Aldous Huxley,

62:The Prohibition era is so vividly depicted in Lawless. John Hillcoat does a remarkable job of rooting his film in such a tangible reality. ~ Dane DeHaan,

63:Liquor prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in America, and drug prohibition has led to the rise of the gang problems we have now. ~ Drew Carey,

64:The worst prohibition, it must be said, is a prohibition on thinking - and that, sadly, is what the U.S. government is guilty of today. ~ Ethan Nadelmann,

65:We are sometime truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of constraints and prohibition. ~ Mary Parker Follett,

66:To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy ~ Umberto Eco,

67:And when Prohibition came along, Dr. Sharpe’s Shakti Tonic took off like a rocket, mostly due to its hefty eighteen percent alcohol content. ~ Donald O Donovan,

68:Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?” “Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can. ~ Libba Bray,

69:Evidence ... proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places, and it does not cure it or even diminish it. ~ Mark Twain,

70:In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced. ~ Frank McCourt,

71:According to Mises, “If the parents are too poor to feed their children adequately, prohibition of child labor condemns the children to starvation. ~ Robert P Murphy,

72:Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?” “Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can. ~ Libba Bray,

73:From the explicit prohibition against the destruction of fruit trees, our sages deduced that it is all the more forbidden to destroy the fruits themselves. ~ Yehuda Levi,

74:For a prohibition always increases an illicit desire so long as the love of and joy in holiness is too weak to conquer the inclination to sin... ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo,

75:Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement. ~ Fiorello H La Guardia,

76:I knew that the Hague Convention prohibited the use of poison in war. I didn't know the details of the terms of the Convention, but I did know of that prohibition. ~ Otto Hahn,

77:The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash. ~ Michael Chabon,

78:The religiosity of the prohibition movement was stoked by a genuine desire to lead holy lives pleasing to God. But purity is easier to regulate than holiness. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber,

79:who not only had once posed for naked pictures but who, on at least two occasions, had openly expressed reservations about Rome’s prohibition against birth control. ~ Tom Robbins,

80:Let's end the unworkable marijuana prohibition and put our money where our mouth is. Let's solve the problems like border crime. We can do it with pot legalization. ~ Gary Johnson,

81:The current prohibition laws are forcing drug disputes to be played out with guns in our streets. We need to put a stop to this criminal drug element in our country. ~ Gary Johnson,

82:Why do the Ten Commandments begin with a prohibition of idolatry? It is, Luther argued, because we never break the other commandments without breaking the first. ~ Timothy J Keller,

83:There are criminals who are drug users, but most addicts are criminals only by virtue of prohibition or from resorting to crime to pay inflated black market prices. ~ Danny Sugerman,

84:They talk about prohibition in America. What can one do in a country such as that?    'What does one do in America when one is sad - without alcohol?' asks Zwonimir. ~ Joseph Roth,

85:Regardless of what one's attitude towards prohibition may be, temperance is something against which, at a time of war, no reasonable protest can be made. ~ William Lyon Mackenzie King,

86:Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society’s prohibition on women’s magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips! ~ Zen Cho,

87:I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect. ~ Bertrand Russell,

88:There was one thing Felix had denied her. One prohibition he'd set down - which made it something to fixate on and wonder about. What was so secret about suite 3013? ~ Sarah Cross,

89:God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,

90:Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded. ~ Johann Hari,

91:asking them to join his new Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (probably a better name than another he had considered, the Association Against Fanatical Minorities). ~ Daniel Okrent,

92:Among the dragons, the prohibition against asking direct questions did not exist, and-as Harrier discovered immediately-dragons were even more outrageous gossips than sailors. ~ Mercedes Lackey,

93:No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry. ~ Max Black,

94:Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains. ~ Timothy Egan,

95:there are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities. ~ Amartya Sen,

96:Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could. ~ William F Buckley Jr,

97:Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious ~ Mark Twain,

98:Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious. ~ Mark Twain,

99:When we repress our desires, they do not disappear but stay beneath the surface and continue to exert their influence. Prohibition arouses desire and suggests stratagems for satisfying it. ~ Alain Dani lou,

100:when gallops on hired shying hacks were doubly dear, by prohibition; and filthy bird’s-eye, smoked in clays, sweeter to our senses then, than purest Havannahs smoked to-day, on the steps of Pratt’s, ~ Ouida,

101:We finally need to pass a prohibition on anyone who's on the terrorist watch list from being able to buy a gun in America. If you're too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to buy a gun. ~ Hillary Clinton,

102:That the work of a drinker who had no intention of stopping drinking should become a major propaganda piece in the campaign for Prohibition is surely one of the ironies in the history of alcohol. ~ Jack London,

103:Thirteen states with a population less than that of New York State alone can prevent repeal [of prohibition] until Halley's comet returns. One might as well talk about a summer vacation on Mars. ~ Clarence Darrow,

104:ou could talk about Prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses, but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was when the conversation became serious. ~ Burton G Malkiel,

105:You could talk about Prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses, but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was when the conversation became serious. ~ Burton G Malkiel,

106:How often would I have the chance to see a pretty girl bathing? I could recall no specific prohibition from the church or the Scriptures, though I knew it was wrong. But maybe it wasn't terribly sinful. ~ John Grisham,

107:It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang-out. Yes; and it might be in a prohibition state... ~ Jack London,

108:The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own. ~ Johann Hari,

109:alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level,” and by the time of Repeal had risen “to about 60–70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. ~ Daniel Okrent,

110:Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90--and all this without taxes. ~ Bill Bryson,

111:He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes—perfect for small and secret spaces. ~ Nicole Mones,

112:It might be a little rough on some people for a while, but I think it's the only way to deal with drugs. Look at Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich. Should be legalized for a matter of sanity. ~ Hunter S Thompson,

113:What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies. ~ Sam Harris,

114:Nat flung her arm over my shoulders and Alex leaned against my other side, the prohibition against touching gone for a few brief seconds as everyone collapsed together in a heap. But I wasn't wulfen. I was still lonely. ~ Lili St Crow,

115:The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced ~ Albert Einstein,

116:Race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. Humans being humans, and sex being sex, that prohibition never stopped anyone. There were mixed kids in south Africa 9 months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach at Table Bay. ~ Trevor Noah,

117:Here’s an argument I heard in Paris that I can’t shake. Take the prohibition of abortion. God forbids it, right? So, is that why it’s wrong, just because he forbids it? Or did God forbid abortion because it’s wrong? Which is it? ~ Alex Rosenberg,

118:Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws. ~ George Soros,

119:The objector to prohibition spoke bitterly: "Water has killed more folks than liquor ever did." "You are raving," declared the defender of the Eighteenth Amendment. "How do you make that out?" "Well, to begin with, there was the Flood. ~ Anonymous,

120:Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it. It's left a trail of graft and slime It don't prohibit worth a dime It's filled our land with vice and crime, Nevertheless, we're for it. ~ Franklin P Adams,

121:Canned breakfast juices had first appeared during Prohibition, motivated by grape growers who could no longer sell their products as wine, and by orange growers in California and Florida burdened with surplus oranges during years of glut. ~ Gary Taubes,

122:For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad—it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse. ~ Johann Hari,

123:Since the writing of our Constitution, our religious liberties have been systematically threatened and whittled away by Supreme Court justices who interpret the First Amendment as a prohibition against religious activity on public property. ~ Tim LaHaye,

124:Some will say prohibition is futile because it doesn’t achieve its stated objectives, and many governments can’t even keep drugs out of prisons. They are missing the point: prohibition works exactly as intended and is a very profitable racket. ~ Adam Kokesh,

125:The prohibition of science would be contrary to the Bible, which in hundreds of places teaches us how the greatness and the glory of God shine forth marvelously in all His works, and is to be read above all in the open book of the heavens. ~ Galileo Galilei,

126:This would be the structure of the "successful" couple: a little prohibition, a good deal of play; to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don't insist on accompanying you on your way. ~ Roland Barthes,

127:I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance. ~ H L Mencken,

128:The Compromise of 1850 provided that the prohibition of slavery should be left up to the individual States, thus thwarting the Canaanites in their attempts to make this problem an excuse for federal intervention and a cause of war between the States. ~ Eustace Mullins,

129:The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars' place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night-to see that the guests didn't bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house. ~ Raymond Chandler,

130:The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars’ place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night—to see that the guests didn’t bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house. ~ Raymond Chandler,

131:We are losing the war against cancer... I would like to offer for your consideration the following legislative proposals on the following topics: prohibition of the authorisation of new carcinogenic products; reduction of toxics in use; right-to-know... ~ Samuel Epstein,

132:Being a cabbage has its drawbacks. Members of the cabbage family do not possess legs and can’t run away from predators. Instead, cabbages have evolved a high-tech defense system that would turn heads at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. ~ Anonymous,

133:Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. ~ Anonymous,

134:The fact that the prohibited tree was placed in the center of the garden, right next to the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9), symbolizes that the life that God intends for us revolves around our honoring God’s prohibition as much as trusting God for his provision.The ~ Gregory A Boyd,

135:Drug prohibition has caused gang warfare and other violent crimes by raising the prices of drugs so much that vicious criminals enter the market to make astronomical profits, and addicts rob and steal to get money to pay the inflated prices for their drugs. ~ Michael Badnarik,

136:Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,

137:Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. ~ Abraham Lincoln,

138:Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. ~ Milton Friedman,

139:Hollywood and the music industry did everything they could to stop the copying. To no avail. They succeeded only in making enemies of their customers.) Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive. ~ Kevin Kelly,

140:If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic. ~ Milton Friedman,

141:But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law. ~ H G Wells,

142:By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice. ~ Thomas Szasz,

143:I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that? ~ Timothy Leary,

144:I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we've got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I'm not really in favor of health and fitness. ~ Barbara Holland,

145:Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition. ~ Rodney Stark,

146:The lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people. ~ Kurt Schmoke,

147:I hear it was the fact that the Brennans had a hellfireanddamnation preacher runnin' their family back in Prohibition days and you Gallaghers were runnin' moonshine to get by and got caught. Your family blamed the Brennans for rattin' you out, and that started a feud," Rosalie said. ~ Carolyn Brown,

148:When Prohibition produced high incarceration rates for whites, many people viewed the law as harmful, and the United States repealed Prohibition (Kyvig 1979); but when current U.S. laws against drug use produce high incarceration rates for African Americans … the laws go little changed. ~ Anonymous,

149:No political party can ever make prohibition effective. A political party implies an adverse, an opposing, political party. To enforce criminal statutes implies substantial unanimity in the community. This is the result of the jury system. Hence the futility of party prohibition. ~ Rutherford B Hayes,

150:I started with the book Boardwalk Empire and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story. ~ Terence Winter,

151:It was the beginning of that dark time of blood, and crime, and terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people—particularly the young everywhere. At ~ Thomas Wolfe,

152:The congress of the United States possesses no power to regulate, or interfere with the domestic concerns, or police of any state: it belongs not to them to establish any rules respecting the rights of property; nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people. ~ St George Tucker,

153:During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections. ~ Martin Scorsese,

154:Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.) ~ Michael Pollan,

155:I'd like to promote lots of things. I'd like to promote elimination of drug prohibition. I'd like to promote parental choice in education through vouchers. Those are two things I think are very urgent and important. They're both more important than the harm which Social Security will do. ~ Milton Friedman,

156:Nor is the Gita a collection of do’s and dont’s. What is lawful for one may be unlawful for another. What may be permissible at one time, or in one place, may not be so at another time, and in another place. Desire for fruit is the only universal prohibition. Desirelessness is obligatory. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,

157:Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,

158:In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. ~ Abe Fortas,

159:There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do. ~ Bill Bryson,

160:In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness. ~ Leo Tolstoy,

161:Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned. You could not say that you would observe this prohibition but not that. I shall not commit theft -- certainly not -- but adultery is another matter: wrong for other people, but not for me. ~ Alexander McCall Smith,

162:Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life. ~ Harriet Martineau,

163:If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defense. ~ Frans de Waal,

164:Love is the central command in Scripture and judgment the central prohibition. Indeed, judgment is the “original sin” in Scripture. This is why the forbidden tree in the center of the garden—the prohibition around which life in the garden revolved—was called the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. ~ Gregory A Boyd,

165:A wise politician, when asked if he were for or against Prohibition, answered: If by alcohol, you mean the dangerous drink which destroys families, than I am fully for Prohibition. But if, by alcohol, you mean noble drink which promotes good fellowship and makes every meal a pleasure, then I am against it. ~ Leil Lowndes,

166:Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. ~ Yuval Noah Harari,

167:People of faith should not invoke the power of the state to decide what everyone can believe or think or read or do. In such cases, like abortion or prayer or prohibition or sexual identity, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law. ~ Edward Kennedy,

168:When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s. ~ Johann Hari,

169:And may I not be allowed to ... read in the character of the American people, in their devotion to true liberty and to the Constitution which is its palladium [protection], ... a Government which watches over ... the equal interdict [prohibition] against encroachments and compacts between religion and the state. ~ James Madison,

170:I think that, that it would be hard for New Hampshire to vote for somebody who was a fundamentalist minister, affable as he is. He does seem to actually want to write, for example, a prohibition against abortion into the Constitution , which Ronald Reagan, for all his talking about it, never tried to do one time. ~ Mike Huckabee,

171:In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm? ~ Hyeonseo Lee,

172:There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country. ~ P D James,

173:right at the start of the drug war, gangsters supported prohibition, even bribing Harry Anslinger’s agents to impose it more rapidly. Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war? ~ Johann Hari,

174:But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly. ~ Terry Pratchett,

175:The availability of domesticated animal species played an important role in the prohibition of cannibalism and the development of religions of love and mercy in the states and empires of the Old World. Christianity, it may yet turn out, was more the gift of the lamb in the manger than the child who was born in it. ~ Marvin Harris,

176:The major basis for my opposition to marijuana prohibition has not been how badly it's worked, the fact that it's produced much more harm than good - it has been primarily a moral reason: I don't think the state has any more right to tell me what to put into my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth. ~ Milton Friedman,

177:Why the word ought? It’s not a matter of permission or prohibition. He will suffer if he is sorry for his victim. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,” he added dreamily, not in the tone of the conversation. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

178:Successful law is simply the publication of the practice of the majority of units of a society, and by it the inevitable variable units are either driven to conform or are eliminated. We have had many examples of law trying to be the well-spring of action; our prohibition law showed how completely fallacious that theory is. ~ John Steinbeck,

179:The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. ~ Albert Einstein,

180:Throughout our history each and every generation has expanded upon the freedoms won by their parents and grandparents. Each and every generation has removed some of the barriers to full participation in the American dream. And the next great barrier standing before our generation is the prohibition on marriage for same-sex couples ~ Michael Bloomberg,

181:How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition ... The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction for this obscene call, ENJOY, is superego. The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy. The problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy. ~ Slavoj i ek,

182:summit of prosperity by persisting for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition.”37 Indeed, in the end, it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded. ~ Sven Beckert,

183:I'm questioning it. We're trying to get a lot of money for health and education and I'm wondering... You look at these gangs, and I look back at Prohibition. When we didn't allow alcohol, what did we have? We had gangs. We had big gangs. It's something that needs to be discussed a little more. It's an economic issue and a violence issue. ~ Michael Douglas,

184:One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s. ~ Martin Scorsese,

185:We need to make sure we are doing what Jesus said and not what we thought Jesus must have said. The textbook case against Christian activism can be made in one word—Prohibition—the word that would have made the Lord Jesus at Cana into a moonshiner felon. We did a great job there of setting aside the Word of God for the sake of our tradition ~ Douglas Wilson,

186:One night the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. My parents would disown me if they found out I had been put in jail with a bunch of common violators of the prohibition law. We were only there three hours, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life. That ~ Ray Kroc,

187:One well known English professor of Greek burst out in anger at our saving that a potent potion was drunk at Fleusis: we had touched him at a sensitive spot. He seemed to wish to join the class of those pastors in our Bible Belt who, when Prohibition was flying high, seriously pretended that Jesus served grape juice, not wine, at his Last Supper! ~ R Gordon Wasson,

188:Even if sexual orientation were a choice, aren't we a country where we're supposed to be free to pursue our happiness, whether we're hetero-, homo-, bi-, trans-, or even a-sexual? To use [an analogy that homosexuality is a vice, like drinking], being antigay is like Prohibition, when a small group of busybodies thought no one should be allowed to drink. ~ Alex Sanchez,

189:lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. ~ Timothy Snyder,

190:So, what were you doing that was such a secret?" "Making moonshine." I stared. "You're kidding me." "Nope." "Moonshine? As in rednecks and brown jugs and prohibition?" Ida Belle drew herself up straight. "It hasn't been illegal in quite some time. We're hardly rednecks, and we put all of our moonshine into pretty pink cough syrup bottles. ~ Jana Deleon,

191:If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. ~ Timothy Snyder,

192:The First Amendment of the US Constitution ... is an eloquent repudiation of the First Commandment's prohibition of religious freedom. It is also a repudiation of the Third Commandment's prohibition of freedom of speech. The Thirteenth Amendment repudiates the institution of slavery which is so cozily assumed by the Fourth and Tenth Protestant Commandments. ~ Frank Zindler,

193:Professor Jeffrey Miron17 of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated. ~ Johann Hari,

194:Paul understood that the prohibition (what he called “the Law”) was not the water that extinguished excessive desire, but a fuel that fed it. The problem for Paul was not desire as such, but rather its morphing into an obsessive/excessive impulse through the introduction of a law—a law that tempts us to act immorally precisely by demanding that we act morally. ~ Peter Rollins,

195:Though the law itself be fair on its face, and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations, between persons in similar circumstances . . . the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution. ~ Michelle Alexander,

196:Of course not. Not as such. But . . . but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say, ‘Yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind.’ It’s table d’hôte or nothing, otherwise . . . well, it could get silly. ~ Terry Pratchett,

197:If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. Professions ~ Timothy Snyder,

198:Since Alexander Hamilton, an increasing percentage of the federal budget had been provided by taxing alcohol. In the early 1900s taxes on liquor made up almost 30 percent of the federal budget—a seemingly implacable obstacle to Prohibition. Now, with the passage of an amendment that allowed a broader tax, the government could give up the alcohol taxes for income taxes. ~ Susan Cheever,

199:In his scintillating new novel, Matt Bondurant explores a crucial period in the history of Virginia and of his family. His gorgeous, precise prose brings to life an amazing cast of characters, including Sherwood Anderson, and the often deadly battles of Prohibition. The Wettest County in the World is a remarkably compelling, highly intelligent, and deeply moving novel. ~ Margot Livesey,

200:The gun-control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts - or even the lives of other people. ~ Thomas Sowell,

201:Misliking the Harrow as I do, I would find no small joy in thwarting him. Have I not admitted that I, too, am prone to greed? But here I personify the united will of the Insequent. Any deviation from that resolve will breach the sacred prohibition which enables the Insequent to endure and prosper. Answering you, I will bring down my own destruction and accomplish only sorrow. ~ Stephen R Donaldson,

202:Deacon Taylor I belonged to the church, And to the party of prohibition; And the villagers thought I died of eating watermelon. In truth I had cirrhosis of the liver, For every noon for thirty years, I slipped behind the prescription partition In Trainor's drug store And poured a generous drink From the bottle marked "Spiritus frumenti." ~ Edgar Lee Masters,

203:Nobody tells the history of marijuana and its prohibition like Russ Belville does. He has a special talent for presenting scholarship in a remarkably engaging way. That’s why I turned to Russ when I needed someone to present on the subject to the annual staff retreat of the Drug Policy Alliance. And it’s why I repeatedly recommend him for speaking and media opportunities. He’s good! ~ Ethan Nadelmann,

204:Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition. The ideal society of etatism is a particular sort of socialistic community; it is usual in discussions involving this ideal society to speak of State Socialism, or, in some connexions, of Christian Socialism. ~ Ludwig von Mises,

205:By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based. ~ John Paul Stevens,

206:The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. The crackdown on cannabis in the 1970s triggered the rise of skunk and superskunk. The crackdown on powder cocaine in the early 1980s led to the creation of crack, a more compact form of the drug. Many drug users want and prefer the milder forms of their drug—but they can’t get them under prohibition, so they are pressed onto harder drugs. ~ Johann Hari,

207:Einstein's prohibition against travelling faster than light may clash with our common sense, but, on this question, why should we trust common sense? Why should our experience at 10 kilometers-an-hour constrain the laws of nature at 300,000 kilomters per second? Relativity does set limits on what humans can ultimately do, but the universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~ Carl Sagan,

208:The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. ~ H L Mencken,

209:Anarchists are extreme libertarian socialists , "libertarian" meaning the demand for freedom from prohibition, and "socialist" meaning the demand for social equality . ...Complete freedom implies equality, since if there are rich and poor, the poor cannot be permitted to take liberties with riches. Complete equality implies freedom, since those who suffer restrictions cannot be the equals of those who impose them. ~ Donald Rooum,

210:Ethan Nadelmann, one of the leading drug reformers in the United States, had explained: "People overdose because [under prohibition] they don't know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent...Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn't know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn't know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams. ~ Johann Hari,

211:Some devout Christians are among the most fervent advocates of the death penalty, contradicting Jesus Christ and justifying their belief on an erroneous interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures. "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," their most likely response, overlooks the fact that this was promulgated by Moses as a limitation- a prohibition against taking both eyes or all of an offender's teeth in retribution. ~ Jimmy Carter,

212:wouldn’t have to suffer the confiscation of hip flasks en route to San Francisco. That was because they didn’t have to take any along. San Francisco had officially declared its distaste for Prohibition even before it had started. Back in 1919, the city’s considerate board of supervisors, mindful of the hardship about to be visited upon its citizens, had unanimously repealed the city ordinance banning unlicensed saloons. ~ Daniel Okrent,

213:I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children. ~ William Randolph Hearst,

214:We have run this historical experiment once before, they point out, and we know what one of the effects will be. When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s. At ~ Johann Hari,

215:Our current draconian laws prohibiting the use of marijuana by responsible adults are doubly flawed. Not only does such prohibition violate fundamental freedoms but also. . . it undermines personal health and public safety. Regardless of your views on the civil liberties issues. . .another compelling justification for marijuana law reform: that it will promote health and safety for all of us, including our nation's children. ~ Nadine Strossen,

216:Alex said, "Okay, I need to know something. Why the Camel Club?" Stone answered, "Because camels have great stamina. They never give up." "That's what Oliver says, but the real reason is this," Reuben countered. "In the 1920s there was another Camel Club. And at each meeting of that club they would all raise their glasses and take a vow to oppose Prohibition to the last drop of whiskey. Now, that's my kind of club. ~ David Baldacci,

217:In a rebuke to American gateway theorists who argued that marijuana stimulates an appetite for addictive narcotics, Dutch experts determined that social factors rather than the pharmacological properties of cannabis were germane to hard drug use. While marijuana smoking in and of itself did not function as a stepping-stone, marijuana prohibition put cannabis consumers in contact with pushers selling an array of illicit substances. ~ Martin A Lee,

218:What happened in Prohibition? What happens to you when you put on a few pounds, and decide to get rid of them with a crash diet? What happened to the, ah, romantic content of movies after public criticism forced the adoption of a rating code? What happens to a daughter whose father forbids her to date? Unwanted efforts to apply a strict standard will almost always backfire, and bring about the very result which they seek to prevent. ~ Bill James,

219:I'm not guilty. You're the one that's guilty. The lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords, all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just like you did with alcohol during Prohibition. You're the one who's guilty. I mean, c'mon, let's kick the ballistics here: ain't no Uzi's made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing is bigger than Nino Brown. This is big business. This is the American way. ~ Wesley Snipes,

220:There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes. ~ Milton Friedman,

221:If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education. ~ Sigmund Freud,

222:I don't really know the history," Piper said, "but Jason told me some of the tunnels were used by smugglers and partyers during Prohibition. Now you get taggers, runaways, homeless folks, monsters, government employees." Meg's mouth twitched. "Government employees?" "It's true," Piper said. "Some of the city workers use the tunnels to go from building to building."'Grover shuddered. "When they could just walk in the sunlight with nature? Repulsive. ~ Rick Riordan,

223:The period of Prohibition - called the noble experiment - brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police. ~ Gore Vidal,

224:Discovery can give no right of ownership, for whatever is discovered must have been already here to be discovered. If a man makes a wheelbarrow, or a book, or a picture, he has a moral right to that particular wheelbarrow, or book, or picture, but no right to ask that others be prevented from making similar things. Such a prohibition, though given for the purpose of stimulating discovery and invention, really in the long run operates as a check upon them. ~ Henry George,

225:In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought. ~ Theodore Dalrymple,

226:But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed … who have been driven from their homes for saying, ‘God is our Lord’ ” (22:39; emphasis added). ~ Reza Aslan,

227:But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed ... who have been driven from their homes for saying, 'God is our Lord' ” (22:39; emphasis added). ~ Reza Aslan,

228:Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead. ~ Marcus Garvey,

229:Christian socialism”). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call “state capitalism. ~ Jonah Goldberg,

230:My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see? ~ Orson Welles,

231:My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society. You see? ~ Peter Biskind,

232:When legislators, after having ruined men by war and taxes, persevere in their idea, they say to themselves, “If the people suffer, it is because there is not money enough. We must make some.” And as it is not easy to multiply the precious metals, especially when the pretended resources of prohibition have been exhausted, they add, “We will make fictitious money, nothing is more easy, and then every citizen will have his pocket-book full of it, and they will all be rich. ~ Fr d ric Bastiat,

233:It is illegal in the UK to even conduct a study on how juries go about their deliberations. The unstated rationale for this prohibition is that if the public find out how juries operate, they might lose confidence in the system. It is an “ignorance is bliss” approach. But this is as intellectually fraudulent as removing the black box from an airplane to insure that people won’t ever find out about pilot error. The result is inevitable: the same mistakes will be made, over and over. ~ Matthew Syed,

234:Pope Francis said the use of contraception could be justified in regions hit by the Zika virus; a stance that could reignite a debate over the church's prohibition of the use of condoms to stop the spread of the AIDS virus. The pope also criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as 'not Christian' for his immigration stance, and broke with his predecessors by suggesting that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions if they want to. ~ Rush Limbaugh,

235:All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy. ~ H L Mencken,

236:Liberal secularists insist that tolerance is the highest virtue. But they don’t tell you what they mean by “tolerance.” To them, tolerance doesn’t simply involve treating those with different ideas respectfully and civilly. It means affirming their ideas as valid, which Christians can’t do without renouncing their own beliefs. If, for example, you subscribe to the biblical prohibition on homosexual behavior as sinful, you cannot at the same time affirm that such behavior is not sinful. ~ Norman L Geisler,

237:Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al Capone. “The trouble with the nation’s economy,” he declared, was simply Prohibition, which “makes it possible for large-scale dealers in illicit liquor to amass tremendous amounts of currency”; the “present economic crisis,” he explained, was due to the “withdrawal of billions of dollars from the channels of legitimate trade” by these bootleggers. ~ Robert A Caro,

238:In 1975, the Children’s Act was the first consideration of issues “in the best interest of the child.” Adopted people gained the right to have access to their birth records (although this is still not upheld in most states); adoption allowances for families adopting special needs children were allotted; and the prohibition of private placements without the involvement of child welfare agencies to protect the children’s rights and to counsel the birth and adoptive parents was endorsed. ~ Joyce Maguire Pavao,

239:The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture. ~ Ellen Willis,

240:Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished. ~ H L Mencken,

241:Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet - who was only another male mammal - is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. ~ Christopher Hitchens,

242:In the irrational universe of demanded spontaneity, the power of state reaches beyond the prohibition of acts contrary to society, assigning itself the task of prescribing the citizen's thoughts and convictions. To quote Revel's concise conclusion, 'C'est dans les sociétiés totalitaires que l'Etat se charge de 'donner un sens' à la vie des êtres' ['In totalitarian societies the state assumes the task of giving life a meaning']. Thus original thought becomes treason, and life becomes a hell of a particular kind. ~ Paul Watzlawick,

243:with that characteristic touch of late-Romanov rashness, the government, by ukase of August 22, extended prohibition for the duration of the war. As the sale of vodka was a state monopoly, this act at one stroke cut off a third of the government’s income. It was well known, commented a bewildered member of the Duma, that governments waging war seek by a variety of taxes and levies to increase income, “but never since the dawn of history has a country in time of war renounced the principal source of its revenue. ~ Barbara W Tuchman,

244:Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter? ~ Nancy Mairs,

245:Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction. ~ David Simon,

246:An official government study18 found that before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—addicts) had steady and respectable jobs. Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy,19 while only 6 percent were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, and although it would have been better for them to stop, they were rarely out of control or criminal.20 But in 1914, the Harrison Act was passed, and then Anslinger arrived sixteen years later to rapidly ratchet it up. ~ Johann Hari,

247:The real transgression occurs when religion wants government to tell citizens how to live uniquely personal parts of their lives. The failure of Prohibition proves the futility of such an attempt when a majority or even a substantial minority happens to disagree. Some questions may be inherently individual ones, or people may be sharply divided about whether they are. In such cases, like Prohibition and abortion, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state. ~ Edward Kennedy,

248:The prohibition amendment to the Constitution requires the Congress. and the President to provide adequate laws to prevent its violation. It is my duty to enforce such laws.To prevent smuggling, the Coast Card should be greatly strengthened, and a supply of swift power boats should be provided. The major sources of production should be rigidly regulated, and every effort should be made to suppress interstate traffic... It is the duty of a citizen not only to observe the law but to let it be known that he is opposed to its violation. ~ Calvin Coolidge,

249:When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognised. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before. ~ John D Rockefeller,

250:If a country supports prohibition, it is also guaranteeing that on the supply side all profits will accrue to underground networks; and on the demand side it is guaranteeing that any social or public health problems associated with drug taking will in the great majority of cases only come to light once they are out of control. If the UN is right and drugs account for 70 percent of organized criminal activity, then the legalization of drugs would administer by far the deadliest blow possible against transnational organized criminal networks. ~ Misha Glenny,

251:Although it is common to think of Jim Crow as an explicitly race-based system, in fact a number of the key policies were officially colorblind. As previously noted, poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon disenfranchisement laws were all formally race-neutral practices that were employed in order to avoid the prohibition on race discrimination in voting contained in the Fifteenth Amendment. The laws operated to create an all-white electorate because they excluded African Americans from the franchise but were not generally applied to whites. ~ Michelle Alexander,

252:Jesus demanded, “You shall not want to commit adultery.” Many ancient Jewish moralists condemned lust; some later rabbis even compared extreme lust to adultery. Jesus’ warning here develops the context of the prohibition against adultery in the law: the seventh commandment prohibited adultery, but the tenth commandment warned that one should not even covet one’s neighbor’s wife (Ex 20:17; Dt 5:21). Jesus uses here the same verb as in the standard Greek translation of the tenth commandment. He refers, then, to wanting to have one’s neighbor’s wife. ~ Anonymous,

253:Albania’s future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe ~ Ismail Kadare,

254:So despite the Orthodox prohibition against working on Saturday, and despite having three school-age children, for many years Hadassah worked for Huguette from eight A.M. to eight P.M., twelve hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. She was up and out of the house before her children left for school and home close to bedtime. It would be several years before she took a day off. Hadassah was paid $30 an hour, $2,520 a week, $131,040 a year, but she described her self-sacrifice for Huguette as extreme. “I give my life to Madame,” Hadassah said. ~ Bill Dedman,

255:Though at times interested in reforms, notably prohibition (I have never tasted alcoholic liquor), I was inclined to be bored by ethical casuistry; since I believed conduct to be a matter of taste and breeding, with virtue, delicacy, and truthfulness as symbols of gentility. Of my word and honour I was inordinately proud, and would permit no reflections to be cast upon them. I thought ethics too obvious and commonplace to be scientifically discussed, and considered philosophy solely in its relation to truth and beauty. I was, and still am, pagan to the core. ~ H P Lovecraft,

256:George Trimble Do you remember when I stood on the steps Of the Court House and talked free-silver, And the single-tax of Henry George? Then do you remember that, when the Peerless Leader Lost the first battle, I began to talk prohibition, And became active in the church? That was due to my wife, Who pictured to me my destruction If I did not prove my morality to the people. Well, she ruined me: For the radicals grew suspicious of me, And the conservatives were never sure of me -And here I lie, unwept of all. ~ Edgar Lee Masters,

257:Government, New Englanders believed from the beginning, could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools. More than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of government as being run by and for themselves. Everyone is supposed to participate, and there is no greater outrage than to manipulate the political process for private gain. Yankee idealism never died. ~ Colin Woodard,

258:The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment... that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence? ...I do not maintain that prohibition of sex is a ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch. ~ Michel Foucault,

259:What is unconscious cannot be abolished by proclamation or prohibition. One can, however, develop sensitivity toward recognizing it and begin to experience it consciously, and thus eventually gain control over it. A mother cannot truly respect her child as long as she does not realize what deep shame she causes him with an ironic remark, intended only to cover her own uncertainty. Indeed, she cannot be aware of how deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels, if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings, and if she tries to fend them off with irony. ~ Alice Miller,

260:What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,

261:In fact, some drugs were completely misunderstood. Morphine, for example, wasn’t seen so much as a painkiller back then as a sleep aid…albeit one that was highly addictive. So much so that a former Confederate colonel named John Pemberton created a coca wine—a sort of tonic made of wine and cocaine—as a medicinal cure. When the city of Atlanta passed prohibition laws in 1886, Pemberton swapped out the wine for carbonated water, but the cocaine stayed in the beverage for almost two more decades. Today Pemberton’s drink is still sold as Coca-Cola, but the medicinal roots are long gone. ~ Aaron Mahnke,

262:And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal? ~ Felix Mendelssohn,

263:Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d’ bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale. The ~ Ray Kroc,

264:Third, the prohibition against questioning religious beliefs is also an absolute moral position. Why shouldn’t we question religious beliefs? Would it be immoral to do so? And if so, by whose standard? Do pluralists have any good reasons supporting their belief that we ought not question religious beliefs, or is it just their own personal opinion that they want to impose on the rest of us? Unless they can give us good reasons for such a moral standard, why should we allow them to impose it on us? And why are pluralists trying to impose that moral position on us anyway? That’s not very “tolerant” of them. ~ Norman L Geisler,

265:Sincerity and effort are two strong legs, but two legs are not enough to stabilize a stool. Christian activists need sincerity, effort, and thoughtful prayer. A minister who had misgivings about the prohibition movement remarked that “the churches in the long run would get further if their activities were marked by less commotion and more insight.”24 It is hard to disagree with this. Jesus, as always, is the perfect model of a man who worked hard during the day and prayed hard during the morning and night. Peter is the model of a man who acted fast (cutting off a soldier’s ear, for instance) and had much to repent. ~ Gary L Thomas,

266:The propensity of our contemporaries to demand authoritarian prohibition as soon as something does not please them, and their readiness to submit to such prohibitions even when what is prohibited is quite agreeable to them shows how deeply ingrained the spirit of servility still remains within them. It will require many long years of self-education until the subject can turn himself into the citizen. A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police. ~ Ludwig von Mises,

267:The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper. The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches. What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories? In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. ~ A S Byatt,

268:Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . . ~ Roland Barthes,

269:But since the will of man could turn either way, God secured this grace that He had given by making it conditional from the first upon two things--namely, a law and a place. He set them in His own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition. If they guarded the grace and retained the loveliness of their original innocence, then the life of paradise should be theirs, without sorrow, pain or care, and after it the assurance of immortality in heaven. But if they went astray and became vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live no longer in paradise, but, dying outside of it, continue in death and in corruption. ~ Saint Athanasius of Alexandria,

270:Prohibition—this policy I have traced across continents and across a century—consists of endlessly spreading downward spirals. People get addicted so we humiliate and shame them until they become more addicted. They then have to feed their habit by persuading more people to buy the drugs from them and become addicted in turn. Then those people need to be humiliated and shamed. And so it goes, on and on. But in Portugal after the drug war, the state helped people to get better, and then those people helped more people to get better, and then they helped still more people to get better—and so the downward spiral of the drug war has been replaced by a healing ripple that spreads slowly out across the society. ~ Johann Hari,

271:It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment...the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. ~ Sinclair Lewis,

272:Every art that could inflame the passions and touch the interests of men has been essayed,” Washington complained in early April 1788. “The ignorant have been told, that should the proposed Government obtain, their land would be taken from them and their property disposed of, and all ranks are informed that the prohibition of the Navigation of the Mississippi (their favorite object) will be a certain consequence of the adoption of the Constitution.”2 Their forte, Washington soon added about antifederalists, “seems to lie in misrepresentation . . . rather than to convince the understanding by some arguments or fair and impartial statements.”3 He dismissed most of them as “contemptible characters” of “little importance. ~ Edward J Larson,

273:The experience left me with a very strong sense of just how destructive this simple, seemingly mundane tool can be. A knife never jams. A knife never runs out of ammunition; you rarely see a gunshot murder victim who has been shot more than a few times, but any homicide investigator can tell you how common it is for the victim of a knife murder to bear twenty, thirty, or more stab and/or slash wounds. “A knife comes with a built-in silencer.” Knives are cheap, and can be bought anywhere; there used to be a cutlery store at LaGuardia Airport, not far outside the security gates. There is no prohibition at law against a knife being sold to a convicted felon. Knives can be small and flat and amazingly easy to conceal. Anywhere ~ Massad Ayoob,

274:Religion has no physical conception of the world; it has no interest in a physical explanation, which can never be given but with a mode of origin. Origin is a theoretical, natural philosophical idea. The heathen philosophers busied themselves with the origin of things. But the religious consciousness abhorred this idea as heathen, irreligious, and substituted the practical or subjective idea of creation, which is nothing else than a prohibition to conceive things as having arisen in a natural way … The religious consciousness connects the world immediately with God; … The question, how did God create? is an indirect doubt that he did create the world. It was the question which brought man to atheism, materialism, naturalism. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,

275:So was a brochure entitled “How Prohibition Would Affect California,” an unmistakable example of Stoll’s high-stepping jauntiness. There wasn’t a single teetotaler “among the world’s really great men,” Stoll wrote; on the contrary, he said, the roster of wine-loving giants ran from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Columbus, Dickens, Lincoln, and Bismarck, not to mention Verdi, Wagner, and Admiral Dewey. How he knew what he claimed to know about the drinking habits of his Hall of Fame was unclear, but it set up the punch line: “What names can the prohibitionists show to compare with those above?” the brochure asked. “Has there ever been a prohibitionist who was a really great man . . . unless it be Mohammed, the first prohibitionist? ~ Daniel Okrent,

276:Jack Mcguire They would have lynched me Had I not been secretly hurried away To the jail at Peoria. And yet I was going peacefully home, Carrying my jug, a little drunk, When Logan, the marshal, halted me, Called me a drunken hound and shook me, And, when I cursed him for it, struck me With that Prohibition loaded cane -All this before I shot him. They would have hanged me except for this: My lawyer, Kinsey Keene, was helping to land Old Thomas Rhodes for wrecking the bank, And the judge was a friend of Rhodes And wanted him to escape, And Kinsey offered to quit on Rhodes For fourteen years for me. And the bargain was made. I served my time And learned to read and write. ~ Edgar Lee Masters,

277:Still, it is possible to outlaw entire technologies. In 2006 Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired magazine, did a study of the effectiveness of technology prohibitions across the last thousand years, beginning in the year 1000. During this period governments had banned numerous technologies and inventions, including crossbows, guns, mines, nuclear bombs, electricity, automobiles, large sailing ships, bathtubs, blood transfusions, vaccines, television, computers, and the Internet. Kelly found that few technology prohibitions had any staying power and that in general, the more recent the prohibition, the shorter its duration. Figure Epilogue Kevin Kelly’s chart of the duration of a technology prohibition plotted against the year in which it was imposed. ~ George M Church,

278:One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood. ~ Charles Brandt,

279:Very well, we don’t wish you to be unhappy;—if you think that you will enjoy it so very much, you must go; that’s all;” when this day of theatre-going, hitherto forbidden and unattainable, depended now only upon myself, then for the first time, being no longer troubled by the wish that it might cease to be impossible, I asked myself if it were desirable, if there were not other reasons than my parents’ prohibition which should make me abandon my design. In the first place, whereas I had been detesting them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me also with a pain through which the purpose of life shewed itself as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and life itself seemed good or evil only as my parents were happy or sad. ~ Marcel Proust,

280:America had become an ice cream society in the last years of the twenties, thanks in large part to Prohibition. Bars and fine lounges in hotels sold ice cream, because they could no longer sell liquor, and dairy bars began to crop up all over the country. It was an incredible era. The straitlaced Cal Coolidge, who assured the nation that his fiscal probity had brought prosperity here to stay, moved the White House to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the summer and celebrated the Fourth of July by parading around in a cowboy costume. Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for the stupefying figure of $70,000 a year. Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris. Al Jolson sang in the first talking pictures. And—wonder of wonders—in 1929 the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant! Big ~ Ray Kroc,

281:Think of all the requirements writers imagine for themselves: A cabin in the woods A plain wooden table Absolute silence A favorite pen A favorite ink A favorite blank book A favorite typewriter A favorite laptop A favorite writing program A large advance A yellow pad A wastebasket A shotgun The early light of morning The moon at night A rainy afternoon A thunderstorm with high winds The first snow of winter A cup of coffee in just the right cup A beer A mug of green tea A bourbon Solitude Sooner or later the need for any one of these will prevent you from writing. Anything you think you need in order to write— Or be “inspired” to write or “get in the mood” to write— Becomes a prohibition when it’s lacking. Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions, With anything, starting from nowhere. All you really need is your head, the one indispensable ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg,

282:Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! ~ Sinclair Lewis,

283:Telephone calls began coming from private citizens reporting fresh outbreaks of fire and the looting of Jewish businesses all over Munich. Hitler angrily sent for SS General Friedrich Karl von Eberstein, the city's police chief, and told him to restore order at once. He telephoned Goebbels and furiously demanded: ‘What's the game?’ He sent out Schaub and other members of his staff to stop the looting and arson. He ordered special protection for the famous antique dealers, Bernheimer's. At 2:56 A.M. a telex was issued by Rudolf Hess's staff as deputy of the Führer – and was repeated to all gauleiters as Party Ordinance No. 174 – forbidding all such demonstrations: ‘On express orders issued at the highest level of all there is to be no arson or the like, whatever, under any circumstances, against Jewish businesses.’ The Gestapo followed suit – thus at 3:45 A.M. the Berlin Gestapo repeated this prohibition. ~ David Irving,

284:Oh. I see. So your grace never curses.” “I do not.” “Words like cor . . . bollocks . . . damn . . . devil . . . blast . . . bloody hell . . .” She pronounced the words with relish, warming to her task. “They don’t cross a duchess’s lips?” “No.” “Never?” “Never.” Miss Simms’s fair brow creased in thought. “What if a duchess steps on a tack? What if a gust of wind steals a duchess’s best powdered wig? Not even then?” “Not even when an impertinent farm girl provokes a duchess to a simmering rage,” she replied evenly. “A duchess might contemplate all manner of cutting remarks and frustrated oaths. But even in the face of extreme annoyance, she stifles any such ejaculations.” “My,” Miss Simms said, wide-eyed. “I do hope dukes aren’t held to the same standard. Can’t be healthy for a man, always stifling his ejaculations.” Griff promptly broke the prohibition against elbows on the table, smothering a burst of laughter with his palm and disguising it as a coughing ~ Tessa Dare,

285:It is remarkable that circumcision, which is invariably practiced by thE Mahometans, and forms a distinguishing rite of their faith, to which all proselytes must conform, is neither mentioned in the Koran nor the Sonna. It seems to have been a general usage in Arabia, tacitly adopted from the Jews, and is even said to have been prevalent throughout the East before the time of Moses. It is said that the Koran forbids the making likenesses of any living thing, which has prevented the introduction of portrait-painting among Mahometans. The passage of the Koran, however, which is thought to contain the prohibition, seems merely an echo of the second commandment, held sacred by Jews and Christians, not to form images or pictures for worship. One of Mahomet's standards was a black eagle. Among the most distinguished Moslem ornaments of the Alhambra at Granada is a fountain supported by lions carved of stone, and some Moslem monarchs have had their effigies stamped on their coins. ~ Washington Irving,

286:Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have come to fulfill the Law of Moses, not to abolish it. Far from rejecting the law, Jesus continually strove to expand and intensify it. Where the law commands, “thou shall not kill,” Jesus added, “if you are angry with your brother or sister you are liable to [the same] judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Where the law states, “thou shall not commit adultery,” Jesus extended it to include “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (Matthew 5:28). Jesus may have disagreed with the scribes and scholars over the correct interpretation of the law, particularly when it came to such matters as the prohibition against working on the Sabbath. But he never rejected the law. On the contrary, Jesus warned that “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19). ~ Reza Aslan,

287:Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother ("in the loving calm of your arms," says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled. Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.) ~ Roland Barthes,

288:Harry Carey Goodhue You never marveled, dullards of Spoon River, When Chase Henry voted against the saloons To revenge himself for being shut off. But none of you was keen enough To follow my steps, or trace me home As Chase's spiritual brother. Do you remember when I fought The bank and the courthouse ring, For pocketing the interest on public funds? And when I fought our leading citizens For making the poor the pack-horses of the taxes? And when I fought the water-works For stealing streets and raising rates? And when I fought the business men Who fought me in these fights? Then do you remember: That staggering up from the wreck of defeat, And the wreck of a ruined career, I slipped from my cloak my last ideal, Hidden from all eyes until then, Like the cherished jawbone of an ass, And smote the bank and the water works, And the business men with prohibition, And made Spoon River pay the cost Of the fights that I had lost? ~ Edgar Lee Masters,

289:God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree, The only sign of our obedience left Among so many signes of power and rule Conferrd upon us, and Dominion giv’n Over all other Creatures that possesse Earth, Aire, and Sea. Then let us not think hard One easie prohibition, who enjoy Free leave so large to all things else, and choice Unlimited of manifold delights: But let us ever praise him, and extoll His bountie, following our delightful task To prune these growing Plants, & tend these Flours, Which were it toilsom, yet with thee were sweet. To whom thus Eve repli’d. O thou for whom And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh, And without whom am to no end, my Guide And Head, what thou hast said is just and right. For wee to him indeed all praises owe, And daily thanks, I chiefly who enjoy So farr the happier Lot, enjoying thee Preeminent by so much odds, while thou Like consort to thy self canst no where find. That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awak’t, and found my self repos’d Under a shade on flours, much wondring where And ~ John Milton,

290:I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative. What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him. ~ William Lane Craig,

291:For John Dillinger In hope he is still alive Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986 In hope he is still alive Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts; thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison; thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger; thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot; thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes; thanks for the American Dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through; thanks for the KKK; for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches; for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces; thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers; thanks for laboratory AIDS; thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs; thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business; thanks for a nation of finks—yes, thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms; you always were a headache and you always were a bore; thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. ~ William S Burroughs,

292:But there are nevertheless three conclusions that seem to follow from our critical examination of the possibilities of inflationary policy. In the first place, all the aims of inflationism can be secured by other sorts of intervention in economic affairs, and secured better, and without undesirable incidental effects. If it is desired to relieve debtors, moratoria may be declared or the obligation to repay loans may be removed altogether; if it is desired to encourage exportation, export premiums may be granted; if it is desired to render importation more difficult, simple prohibition may be resorted to, or import duties levied. All these measures permit discrimination between classes of people, branches of production, and districts, and this is impossible for an inflationary policy. Inflation benefits all debtors, including the rich, and injures all creditors, including the poor; adjustment of the burden of debts by special legislation allows of differentiation. Inflation encourages the exportation of all commodities and hinders all importation; premiums, duties, and prohibitions can be employed discriminatorily. ~ Ludwig von Mises,

293:Everything around you is touched by oil. Plastics are petroleum products. Foodstuffs and transportation of the foodstuffs, and everything else, are dependent on oil, and, ridiculously, our nation is dependent on foreign oil. Many Americans don’t realize that our government, unlike other countries’ governments, prohibits the sale of our domestic oil on the open market. That outdated export ban needs to end. Also needing to end is the bureaucratic prohibition on drilling for our own safe, reliable energy sources. Alaskans have been fighting for the right to drill on our state’s northern shore for decades. The vast majority see the government’s refusal to permit exploration and drilling as a nonsensical federal overreach. Tapping a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—two thousand acres out of nineteen million uninhabited, frozen acres—would give us access to billions of barrels of oil that can be safely extracted and give a huge boost to our economy and energy independence. Oil in the ground is useless. Oil in the hands of American entrepreneurs and job creators means new products, lower prices, and improved national security. ~ Sarah Palin,

294:Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds. ~ Nancy Isenberg,

295:Back in the early 1990s, the FBI started worrying about its ability to conduct telephone surveillance. The FBI could do it with the old analog phone switches: a laborious process involving alligator clips, wires, and a tape recorder. The problem was that digital switches didn’t work that way. Isolating individual connections was harder, and the FBI became concerned about the potential loss of its ability to wiretap. So it lobbied Congress hard and got a law passed in 1994 called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, requiring telcos to re-engineer their digital switches to have eavesdropping capabilities built in. Fast-forward 20 years, and the FBI again wants the IT industry to make surveillance easier for itself. A lot of communications no longer happen over the telephone. They’re happening over chat. They’re happening over e-mail. They’re happening over Skype. The FBI is currently lobbying for a legislative upgrade to CALEA, one that covers all communications systems: all voice, video, and text systems, including World of Warcraft and that little chat window attached to your online Scrabble game. The FBI’s ultimate goal is government prohibition of truly secure communications. Valerie ~ Bruce Schneier,

296:In addition to these physical problems, sexually transmitted diseases are rampant among the homosexual population. 75% of homosexual men carry one or more sexually transmitted diseases, wholly apart from AIDS. These include all sorts of non-viral infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, bacterial infections, and parasites. Also common among homosexuals are viral infections like herpes and hepatitis B (which afflicts 65% of homosexual men), both of which are incurable, as well as hepatitis A and anal warts, which afflict 40% of homosexual men. And I haven’t even included AIDS. Perhaps the most shocking and frightening statistic is that, leaving aside those who die from AIDS, the life expectancy for a homosexual male is about 45 years of age. That compares to a life expectancy of around 70 for men in general. If you include those who die of AIDS, which now infects 30% of homosexual men, the life expectancy drops to 39 years of age. So I think a very good case can be made out on the basis of generally accepted moral principles that homosexual behavior is wrong. It is horribly self-destructive and injurious to another person. Thus, wholly apart from the Bible’s prohibition, there are sound, sensible reasons to regard homosexual activity as wrong. ~ William Lane Craig,

297:You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject... Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction). ~ Roland Barthes,

298:He said that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society.” And before that sentence was over, he took another leap, far bolder than the first—in fact, some ministers walked out—by declaring that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” Everyone knew that Bonhoeffer was talking about the Jews, including Jews who were not baptized Christians. Bonhoeffer then quoted Galatians: “Do good to all men.” To say that it is unequivocally the responsibility of the Christian church to help all Jews was dramatic, even revolutionary. But Bonhoeffer wasn’t through yet. 154 The third way the church can act toward the state, he said, “is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” The translation is awkward, but he meant that a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle. It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state; at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil. This, he said, is permitted only when the church sees its very existence threatened by the state, and when the state ceases to be the state as defined by God. Bonhoeffer added that this condition exists if the state forces the “exclusion of baptized Jews from our Christian congregations or in the prohibition of our mission to the Jews. ~ Eric Metaxas,

299:The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that God created man “in His image, after His likeness.” Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that God has no image. Hence the prohibition against making images of God. For God is beyond all representation, all categorization. “I will be what I will be,” He says to Moses when Moses asks Him His name. All images, forms, concepts and categories are attempts to delimit and define. God cannot be delimited or defined; the attempt to do so is a form of idolatry. “Image,” then, must refer to something quite different than the possession of a specific form. The fundamental point of Genesis 1 is that God transcends nature. Therefore, He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings “in His image,” God gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative. The unprecedented account of God in the Torah’s opening chapter leads to an equally unprecedented view of the human person and the capacity for self-transformation. [...] Everything else in creation is what it is, neither good nor evil, bound by nature and nature’s laws. The human person alone has the possibility of self-transcendence. We may be a handful of dust but we have immortal longings. ~ Jonathan Sacks,

300:Le costume viril musulman est une synthèse des vêtements sacerdotal et monastique et affirme en même temps la dignité virile. C'est le turban qui, d'après les dires du Prophète, indique la dignité spirituelle, donc sacerdotale, de même que la couleur blanche des vêtements, le manteau aux larges plis et le haïk enveloppant la tête et les épaules. Certains vêtements propres aux habitants du désert ont été généralisés et "stylisés" dans un but spirituel. Le caractère monastique, par contre, s'affirme dans la simplicité du costume musulman et dans la prohibition plus ou moins rigoureuse des bijoux d'or et de la soie; seules les femmes peuvent porter l'or et la soie, et ce n'est pas en public mais seulement dans l’intérieur de la maison, - qui correspond au monde intérieur de l'âme, - qu'elles peuvent montrer ces parures. Partout où la civilisation islamique commence à déchoir, c'est d'abord le turban qu'on bannit, puis le port des vêtements larges et souples, qui facilitent les gestes de la prière rituelle. Quant à la campagne menée, en certains pays arabes, en faveur du chapeau, elle vise directement l'abolition des rites, car le bord du chapeau empêche le front de toucher le sol lors des prosternations; la casquette à visière, avec son allure particulièrement profane, n'est pas moins hostile à la tradition. Si l'usage des machines nécessite le port de tels vêtements, cela prouve simplement, du point de vue de l'Islam, que le machinisme éloigne l'homme de son centre existentiel, où il est "debout devant Dieu". ~ Titus Burckhardt,

301:It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary—not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house. And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro—until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog—Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf, no doubt. ~ Henry Roth,

302:A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a ~ James Rickards,

303:Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it! ~ Sinclair Lewis,

304:there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people ~ Sinclair Lewis,

305:Her friend who treated her maid badly was not a wicked person. She behaved well towards her family and she had always been kind to Mma Ramotswe, but when it came to her maid—and Mma Ramotswe had met this maid, who seemed an agreeable, hardworking woman from Molepolole—she seemed to have little concern for her feelings. It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding, thought Mma Ramotswe, was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself. Mma Ramotswe knew that there was a great deal of debate about morality, but in her view it was quite simple. In the first place, there was the old Botswana morality, which was simply right. If a person stuck to this, then he would be doing the right thing and need not worry about it. There were other moralities, of course; there were the Ten Commandments, which she had learned by heart at Sunday School in Mochudi all those years ago; these were also right in the same, absolute way. These codes of morality were like the Botswana Penal Code; they had to be obeyed to the letter. It was no good pretending you were the High Court of Botswana and deciding which parts you were going to observe and which you were not. Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned. You could not say that you would observe this prohibition but not that. I shall not commit theft—certainly not—but adultery is another matter: wrong for other people, but not for me. ~ Alexander McCall Smith,

306:Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him. Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked. Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles. ~ Heinrich Harrer,

307:Meanwhile, two miles down the mine shaft, nineteen men sat in absolute darkness trying to figure out what to do. One of the groups included a man whose arm had been pinned between two timbers, and, out of earshot, the others discussed whether to amputate it or not. The man kept begging them to, but they decided against it and he eventually died. Both groups ran out of food and water and started to drink their own urine. Some used coal dust or bark from the timbers to mask the taste. Some were so hungry that they tried to eat chunks of coal as well. There was an unspoken prohibition against crying, though some men allowed themselves to quietly break down after the lamps died, and many of them avoided thinking about their families. Mostly they just thought about neutral topics like hunting. One man obsessed over the fact that he owed $1.40 for a car part and hoped his wife would pay it after he died. Almost immediately, certain men stepped into leadership roles. While there was still lamplight, these men scouted open passageways to see if they could escape and tried to dig through rockfalls that were blocking their path. When they ran out of water, one man went in search of more and managed to find a precious gallon, which he distributed to the others. These men were also instrumental in getting their fellow survivors to start drinking their own urine or trying to eat coal. Canadian psychologists who interviewed the miners after their rescue determined that these early leaders tended to lack empathy and emotional control, that they were not concerned with the opinions of others, that they associated with only one or two other men in the group, and that their physical abilities far exceeded their verbal abilities. But all of these traits allowed them to take forceful, life-saving action where many other men might not. ~ Sebastian Junger,

308:And even in the open air the stench of whiskey was appalling. To this fiendish poison, I am certain, the greater part of the squalor I saw is due. Many of these vermin were obviously not foreigners—I counted at least five American countenances in which a certain vanished decency half showed through the red whiskey bloating. Then I reflected upon the power of wine, and marveled how self-respecting persons can imbibe such stuff, or permit it to be served upon their tables. It is the deadliest enemy with which humanity is faced. Not all the European wars could produce a tenth of the havock occasioned among men by the wretched fluid which responsible governments allow to be sold openly. Looking upon that mob of sodden brutes, my mind’s eye pictured a scene of different kind; a table bedecked with spotless linen and glistening silver, surrounded by gentlemen immaculate in evening attire—and in the reddening faces of those gentlemen I could trace the same lines which appeared in full development of the beasts of the crowd. Truly, the effects of liquor are universal, and the shamelessness of man unbounded. How can reform be wrought in the crowd, when supposedly respectable boards groan beneath the goblets of rare old vintages? Is mankind asleep, that its enemy is thus entertained as a bosom friend? But a week or two ago, at a parade held in honour of the returning Rhode Island National Guard, the Chief Executive of this State, Mr. Robert Livingston Beeckman, prominent in New York, Newport, and Providence society, appeared in such an intoxicated condition that he could scarce guide his mount, or retain his seat in the saddle, and he the guardian of the liberties and interests of that Colony carved by the faith, hope, and labour of Roger Williams from the wilderness of savage New-England! I am perhaps an extremist on the subject of prohibition, but I can see no justification whatsoever for the tolerance of such a degrading demon as drink. ~ H P Lovecraft,

309:Most of the mortgaged farmers. Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these three years and four and five. Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief. Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on the electric washing machine. Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the bonus. Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed they could get useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer program that promised prosperity without anyone's having to work for it. The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized common laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. of L. Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled governmental jobs. The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League—since it was known that, though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little, said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahs had not found professional morality profitable of late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with them nor paying. Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting their credit. These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to play the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become President, and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who campaigned for him through September and October. ~ Sinclair Lewis,

310:Ohio had achieved statehood in 1803, but it continued to grow dramatically, doubling in population from a quarter of a million to half a million in the decade following 1810. By 1820, it had actually become the fourth most populous state, exceeded only by New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Indiana and Illinois, admitted into the Union as states in 1816 and 1818, had respectively 147,000 and 55,000 people in the census of 1820.33 The southern parts of the three states were settled faster, because the Ohio River provided both a convenient highway for travelers and the promise of access to market. Most early settlers in this area came from the Upland South, the same Piedmont regions that supplied so many migrants to the Southwest. Often of Scots-Irish descent, they got nicknamed “Butternuts” from the color of their homespun clothing. The name “Hoosiers,” before its application to the people of Indiana, seems to have been a derogatory term for the dwellers in the southern backcountry.34 Among the early Hoosiers was Thomas Lincoln, who took his family, including seven-year-old Abraham, from Kentucky into Indiana in 1816. (Abraham Lincoln’s future antagonist Jefferson Davis, also born in Kentucky, traveled with his father, Samuel, down the Mississippi River in 1810, following another branch of the Great Migration.) Some of these settlers crossed the Ohio River because they resented having to compete with slave labor or disapproved of the institution on moral grounds; Thomas Lincoln shared both these antislavery attitudes. Other Butternuts, however, hoped to introduce slavery into their new home. In Indiana Territory, Governor William Henry Harrison, a Virginian, had led futile efforts to suspend the Northwest Ordinance prohibition against slavery. In Illinois, some slaveowners smuggled their bondsmen in under the guise of indentured servants, and as late as 1824 an effort to legalize slavery by changing the state constitution was only defeated by a vote of 6,600 to 5,000.35 ~ Daniel Walker Howe,

311:Crews that fight forest fires in Oregon are now so heavily Hispanic that in 2003, the Oregon Department of Forestry required that crew chiefs be bilingual. In 2006, the department started forcing out veterans. Jaime Pickering, who used to run a squad of 20 firefighters, says the rule means “job losses for Americans—the white people.” Zita Wilensky, a 16-year veteran, was the only white employee of Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Unit. Her co-workers made fun of her and called her gringa and Americana. Miss Wilensky says her boss gave her 60 days to learn Spanish, and fired her when she failed to do so. It is increasingly common, therefore, for Americans to be penalized because they cannot speak Spanish, but employers who insist that workers speak English are guilty of discrimination. In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced a small Catholic college in San Antonio to pay $2.4 million to housekeepers who were required to speak English at work. There are now about 45 million Hispanics in the country. What will the status of Spanish be when there are 130 million Hispanics, as the Census Bureau projects for 2050? In 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the prohibition against discrimination because of “national origin” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that if a foreigner cannot speak to a government agency in his own language he is a victim. Executive Order 13166 required all local governments that receive federal money (all of them, essentially) to translate official documents into any language spoken by at least 3,000 people in the area or 10 percent of the local population. It also required interpreters for non-English speakers. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that hospitals alone would spend $268 million every year implementing Executive Order 13166, and state departments of motor vehicles would spend $8.5 million. OMB estimated that communicating with food stamp recipients who don’t speak English would cost $25.2 million per year. ~ Jared Taylor,

312:The Temperance Army Though you see no banded army, Though you hear no cannons rattle, We are in a mighty contest, We are fighting a great battle. We are few, but we are right: And we wage the holy fight, Night and day, and day and night. If we do not fail or falter, If we do not sleep or slumber, We shall win in this great contest, Though the foe is twice our number. This the burden of our song, 'We are few, but we are strong, And right must triumph over wrong.' O my sisters! O my brothers! There is death all round about us. Must we, then, sit down discouraged? Will you let the wine-cup rout us? Hear the drunkard's awful wail! See the mourners, bowed and pale! Will you, coward, then say 'fail'? Say not that your heart is with us When you do not help or aid us. All who love the cause sincerely Can do something: God has made us Tongues to talk with: you can say Something, if you will, each day, That will help us on our way, Though you are not highly gifted, Though you are not bard or poet, Though you cannot preach or lecture, 695 You can love the cause, and show it Boldly, in each thing you do. Seeking all that's pure and true, This will be a help from you. You can say the liquor traffic Is a curse to any nation; You can say that prohibition Is a blessing and salvation. You can sow good seeds, and, though You may never see them grow, They will not be lost, I know. In this mighty temperance contest, Where no guns or cannons rattle, Though you cannot lead the army Or be chieftain of the battle, With that mighty sword, the tongue, You can fight against the wrong, You can sing some temperance song. Say not that you cannot aid us! Drops of water make the riverMake the mighty Mississippi, That flows on hand on for ever. Every word you say for Right Gives us courage, gives us might, And brings nearer, morn and night. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

313:The differences between religions are reflected very clearly in the different forms of sacred art: compared with Gothic art, above all in its “flamboyant” style, Islamic art is contemplative rather than volitive: it is “intellectual” and not “dramatic”, and it opposes the cold beauty of geometrical design to the mystical heroism of cathedrals. Islam is the perspective of “omnipresence” (“God is everywhere”), which coincides with that of “simultaneity” (“Truth has always been”); it aims at avoiding any “particularization” or “condensation”, any “unique fact” in time and space, although as a religion it necessarily includes an aspect of “unique fact”, without which it would be ineffective or even absurd. In other words Islam aims at what is “everywhere center”, and this is why, symbolically speaking, it replaces the cross with the cube or the woven fabric: it “decentralizes” and “universalizes” to the greatest possible extent, in the realm of art as in that of doctrine; it is opposed to any individualist mode and hence to any “personalist” mysticism. To express ourselves in geometrical terms, we could say that a point which seeks to be unique, and which thus becomes an absolute center, appears to Islam—in art as in theology—as a usurpation of the divine absoluteness and therefore as an “association” (shirk); there is only one single center, God, whence the prohibition against “centralizing” images, especially statues; even the Prophet, the human center of the tradition, has no right to a “Christic uniqueness” and is “decentralized” by the series of other Prophets; the same is true of Islam—or the Koran—which is similarly integrated in a universal “fabric” and a cosmic “rhythm”, having been preceded by other religions—or other “Books”—which it merely restores. The Kaaba, center of the Muslim world, becomes space as soon as one is inside the building: the ritual direction of prayer is then projected toward the four cardinal points. If Christianity is like a central fire, Islam on the contrary resembles a blanket of snow, at once unifying and leveling and having its center everywhere. ~ Frithjof Schuon,

314:Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! ~ Sinclair Lewis,

315:The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of distinction, it falls back on generalisation. The man, instead of having the sense to say he is tired, says he is emancipated and enlightened and liberal and universal.... ...we find it less trouble to let in a jungle of generalisations than to keep watch upon a logical frontier. But this shapeless assimilation is not only found in accepting things in the lump; it is also found in condemning them in the lump. When the same modern mind does begin to be intolerant, it is just as universally intolerant as it was universally tolerant. It sends things in batches to the gallows just as it admitted them in mobs to the sanctuary. It cannot limit its limitations any more than its license....There are...lunatics now having power to lay down the law, who have somehow got it into their heads that any artistic representation of anything wicked must be forbidden as encouraging wickedness. This would obviously be a veto on any tragedy and practically on any tale. But a moment's thought...would show them that this is simply an illogical generalisation from the particular problem of sex. All dignified civilisations conceal sexual things, for the perfectly sensible reason that their mere exhibition does affect the passions. But seeing another man forge a cheque does not make me want to forge a cheque. Seeing the tools for burgling a safe does not arouse an appetite for being a burglar. But the intelligence in question cannot stop itself from stopping anything. It is automatically autocratic; and its very prohibition proceeds in a sort of absence of mind. Indeed, that is the most exact word for it; it is emphatically absence of mind. For the mind exists to make those very distinctions and definitions which these people refuse. They refuse to draw the line anywhere; and drawing a line is the beginning of all philosophy, as it is the beginning of all art. They are the people who are content to say that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and are condemned to pass their lives in looking for eggs from the cock as well as the hen. ~ G K Chesterton,

316:Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are? ~ Sinclair Lewis,

317:All My Pretty Ones Father, this year's jinx rides us apart where you followed our mother to her cold slumber; a second shock boiling its stone to your heart, leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber you from the residence you could not afford: a gold key, your half of a woolen mill, twenty suits from Dunne's, an English Ford, the love and legal verbiage of another will, boxes of pictures of people I do not know. I touch their cardboard faces. They must go. But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album, hold me. I stop here, where a small boy waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come… for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy or for this velvet lady who cannot smile. Is this your father's father, this Commodore in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile has made it unimportant who you are looking for. I'll never know what these faces are all about. I lock them into their book and throw them out. This is the yellow scrapbook that you began the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went down and recent years where you went flush on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush. But before you had that second chance, I cried on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died. These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places. Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now; here, with the winner's cup at the speedboat races, here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow, 15 here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes, running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen; here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize; Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, my first lost keeper, to love or look at later. I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept for three years, telling all she does not say of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept, she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day with your blood, will I drink down your glass of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass. Only in this hoarded span will love persevere. Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you, bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you. ~ Anne Sexton,

318:As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegeto-phobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right of incest marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . . The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rule. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns a member of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case od meddling with other “ways of life”. It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed from all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere. ~ Slavoj i ek,

319:Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his? ~ Naomi Wolf,

320:What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed. ~ Michael Pollan,

321:Father's Letter I 'm going to write a letter to our oldest boy who went Out West last spring to practise law and run for president; I 'll tell him all the gossip I guess he 'd like to hear, For he has n't seen the home-folks for going on a year! Most generally it 's Marthy does the writing, but as she Is suffering with a felon, why, the job devolves on me-So, when the supper things are done and put away to-night, I 'll draw my boots and shed my coat and settle down to write. I 'll tell him crops are looking up, with prospects big for corn, That, fooling with the barnyard gate, the off-ox hurt his horn; That the Templar lodge is doing well--Tim Bennett joined last week When the prohibition candidate for Congress came to speak; That the old gray woodchuck 's living still down in the pasture-lot, A-wondering what 's become of little William, like as not! Oh, yes, there 's lots of pleasant things and no bad news to tell, Except that old Bill Graves was sick, but now he 's up and well. Cy Cooper says--(but I 'll not pass my word that it is so, For Cy he is some punkins on spinning yarns, you know)-He says that, since the freshet, the pickerel are so thick In Baker's pond you can wade in and kill 'em with a stick! The Hubbard girls are teaching school, and Widow Cutler's Bill Has taken Eli Baxter's place in Luther Eastman's mill; Old Deacon Skinner's dog licked Deacon Howard's dog last week, And now there are two lambkins in one flock that will not speak. The yellow rooster froze his feet, a-wadin' through the snow And now he leans ag'in' the fence when he starts in to crow; The chestnut colt that was so skittish when he went away-I 've broke him to the sulky and I drive him every day! We 've got pink window curtains for the front spare-room upstairs And Lizzie's made new covers for the parlor lounge and chairs; We 've roofed the barn and braced the elm that has the hangbird's nest-Oh, there 's been lots of changes since our William went out West! Old Uncle Enos Packard is getting mighty gay-He gave Miss Susan Birchard a peach the other day! His late lamented Sarah hain't been buried quite a year, 129 So his purring 'round Miss Susan causes criticism here. At the last donation party, the minister opined That, if he 'd half suspicioned what was coming, he 'd resigned; For, though they brought him slippers like he was a centipede, His pantry was depleted by the consequential feed! These are the things I 'll write him--our boy that 's in the West; And I 'll tell him how we miss him--his mother and the rest; Why, we never have an apple-pie that mother does n't say: 'He liked it so--I wish that he could have a piece to-day!' I 'll tell him we are prospering, and hope he is the same-That we hope he 'll have no trouble getting on to wealth and fame; And just before I write 'good-by from father and the rest,' I 'll say that 'mother sends her love.' and that will please him best. For when I went away from home, the weekly news I heard Was nothing to the tenderness I found in that one word-The sacred name of mother--why, even now as then, The thought brings back the saintly face, the gracious love again; And in my bosom seems to come a peace that is divine, As if an angel spirit communed awhile with mine; And one man's heart is strengthened by the message from above, And earth seems nearer heaven when 'mother sends her love.' ~ Eugene Field,

322:Rarely do wonder tales end unhappily. They triumph over death. The tale begins with "Once upon a time" or "Once there was" and never really ends when it ends. The ending is actually the beginning. The once upon a time is not a past designation but futuristic: the timelessness of the tale and its lack of geographical specificity endow it with utopian connotations - "utopia" in its original meaning designated "no place," a place that no one had ever envisaged. We form and keep the utopian kernel of the tale safe in our imaginations with hope. The significance of the paradigmatic functions of the wonder tale is that they facilitate recall for teller and listeners. They enable us to store, remember, and reproduce the utopian spirit of the tale and to change it to fit our experiences and desires, owing to the easily identifiable characters who are associated with particular assignments and settings ... The characters, settings, and motifs are combined and varied according to specific functions to induce wonder, It is this sense of wonder that distinguished the wonder tales from such other oral tales as the legend, the fable, the anecdote, and the myth; it is clearly the sense of wonder that distinguishes the literary fairy tale from the moral story, novella, sentimental tale, and other modern short literary genres. Wonder causes astonishment, and as manifested in a marvelous object or phenomenon, it is often regarded as a supernatural occurrence and can be an omen or a portent, It gives rise to admiration, fear, awe, and reverence. The Oxford Universal Dictionary states that wonder is "the emotion excited by the perception of something novel and unexpected, or inexplicable; astonishment mingled with perplexity or bewildered curiosity." In the oral wonder tale, we are to wonder about the workings of the universe, where anything can happen at any time, and these happy or fortuitous events are never to be explained. Nor do the characters demand an explanation - they are opportunistic, are encouraged to be so, and if they do not take advantage of the opportunity that will benefit them in their relations with others, they are either dumb or mean-spirited. The tales seek to awaken our regard for the miraculous condition of life and to evoke in a religious sense profound feelings of awe and respect for life as a miraculous process, which can be altered and changed to compensate for the lack of power, wealth, and pleasure that is most people's lot. Lack, deprivation, prohibition, and interdiction motivate people to look for signs of fulfillment and emancipation. In the wonder tales, those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognize the wondrous signs. They have retained their belief in the miraculous condition of nature, revere nature in all its aspects. They have hot been spoiled by conventionalism, power, or rationalism. In contrast to the humble characters, the villains are those who use words intentionally to exploit, control, transfix, incarcerate, and destroy for their benefit. They have no respect or consideration for nature and other human beings, and they actually seek to abuse magic by preventing change and causing everything to be transfixed according to their interests. Enchantment equals petrification. Breaking the spell equals emancipation. The wondrous protagonist wants to keep the process of natural change flowing and indicates possibilities for overcoming the obstacles that prevent other characters or creatures from living in a peaceful and pleasurable way. ~ Jack D Zipes,

323:Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted ~ Tom Franklin,

324:No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism. Whoever is convinced that indulgence or excessive indulgence in these poisons is pernicious is not hindered from living abstemiously or temperately. This question cannot be treated exclusively in reference to alcoholism, morphinism, cocainism, etc., which all reasonable men acknowledge to be evils. For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious? In sports too, many people are prone to carry their indulgence further than their strength will allow. Why should not the state interfere here as well? Few men know how to be temperate in their sexual life, and it seems especially difficult for aging persons to understand that they should cease entirely to indulge in such pleasures or, at least, do so in moderation. Should not the state intervene here too? More harmful still than all these pleasures, many will say, is the reading of evil literature. Should a press pandering to the lowest instincts of man be allowed to corrupt the soul? Should not the exhibition of pornographic pictures, of obscene plays, in short, of all allurements to immorality, be prohibited? And is not the dissemination of false sociological doctrines just as injurious to men and nations? Should men be permitted to incite others to civil war and to wars against foreign countries? And should scurrilous lampoons and blasphemous diatribes be allowed to undermine respect for God and the Church? We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual's mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated. He becomes a slave of the community, bound to obey the dictates of the majority. It is hardly necessary to expatiate on the ways in which such powers could be abused by malevolent persons in authority. The wielding, of powers of this kind even by men imbued with the best of intentions must needs reduce the world to a graveyard of the spirit. All mankind's progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all. Let no one object that the struggle against morphinism and the struggle against "evil" literature are two quite different things. The only difference between them is that some of the same people who favor the prohibition of the former will not agree to the prohibition of the latter. ~ Ludwig von Mises,

325:Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless. ~ Ann Coulter,

326:author class:Sri Aurobindo collections class:cwsa media class:short poem media Short Poems The Birth of Sin LUCIFER What mighty and ineffable desire Impels thee, Sirioth? Thy accustomed calm Is potently subverted and the eyes That were a god's in sweet tranquillity, Confess a human warmth, a troubled glow. SIRIOTH Lucifer, son of Morning, Angel! thou Art mightiest of the architects of fate. To thee is given with thy magic gaze Compelling mortals as thou leanst sublime From heaven's lucent walls, to sway the world. Is thy felicity of lesser date, Prince of the patient and untiring gods, The gods who work? Dost thou not ever feel Angelic weariness usurp the place Where the great flame and the august desire Were wont to urge thee on? To me it seems That our eternity is far too long For service and there is a word, a thought, More godlike. LUCIFER Sirioth, I will speak the word. Is it not Power? SIRIOTH No, Lucifer, 'tis Love. LUCIFER Love? It was love that for a trillion years Gave me the instinct and immense demand For service, for activity. It fades. Another and more giant passion comes Striding upon me. I behold the world Immeasurably vast, I see the heavens Full of an azure joy and majesty, I see the teeming millions of the stars. Sirioth, how came the Master of the world To be the master? Did He seize control Pushing some ancient weaker sovereign down From sway immemorable? Did He come By peaceful ways, permission or inheritance, To what He is today? Or if indeed He is for ever and for ever rules, Are there no bounds to His immense domain, No obscure corner of unbounded space Forgotten by His fate, that I may seize And make myself an empire as august, Enjoy a like eternity of rule? SIRIOTH Angel, these thoughts are mighty as thyself. But wilt thou then rebel? If He be great To conquer and to punish, what of thee? Eternity of dreadful poignant pain May be thy fate and not eternal rule. LUCIFER Better than still to serve desirelessly, Pursued by a compulsion dull and fierce, Looking through all vast time for one brief hour Of rest, of respite, but instead to find Iron necessity and pant in vain For space, for room, for freedom. SIRIOTH Thou intendest? LUCIFER Sirioth, I do not yet intend; I feel. SIRIOTH For me the sense of active force within Set me to work, as the stars move, the sun Resistless flames through space, the stormwind runs. But I have felt a touch as sweet as spring, And I have heard a music of delight Maddening the heart with the sweet honied stabs Of delicate intolerable joy. Where, where is One to feel the answering bliss? Lucifer, thou from love beganst thy toil. What love? LUCIFER Desire august to help, to serve. SIRIOTH That is not mine. To embrace, to melt and mix Two beings into one, to roll the spirit Tumbling into a surge of common joy, - 'Tis this I seek. LUCIFER Will He permit? SIRIOTH A bar I feel, a prohibition. Someone used A word I could not grasp and called it sin. LUCIFER The word is new, even as these things are. SIRIOTH I know not who he was. He laughed and said, "Sin, sin is born into the world, revolt And change, in Sirioth and in Lucifer, The evening and the morning star. Rejoice, O world!" And I beheld as in a dream Leaping from out thy brain and into mine A woman beautiful, of grandiose mien, Yet terrible, alarming and instinct With nameless menace. And the world was full With clashing and with cries. It seemed to me Angels and Gods and men strove violently To touch her robe, to occupy the place Her beautiful and ominous feet had trod, Crying, "Daughter of Lucifer, be ours, O sweet, adorable and mighty Sin!" Therefore I came to thee. LUCIFER Sirioth, await Her birth, if she must be. For this I know, Necessity rules all the infinite world, And even He perhaps submits unknown To a compulsion. When the time is ripe, We will consult once more what we shall do. previous: 4.2.02_-_An_Image next: 4.2.04_-_Epiphany up: Collected_Poems ~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Birth of Sin ,

327: PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN THE LORD === THE HEAVENLY HOST Afterwards MEPHISTOPHELES (The THREE ARCHANGELS come forward.) RAPHAEL The sun-orb sings, in emulation, 'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round: His path predestined through Creation He ends with step of thunder-sound. The angels from his visage splendid Draw power, whose measure none can say; The lofty works, uncomprehended, Are bright as on the earliest day. GABRIEL And swift, and swift beyond conceiving, The splendor of the world goes round, Day's Eden-brightness still relieving The awful Night's intense profound: The ocean-tides in foam are breaking, Against the rocks' deep bases hurled, And both, the spheric race partaking, Eternal, swift, are onward whirled! MICHAEL And rival storms abroad are surging From sea to land, from land to sea. A chain of deepest action forging Round all, in wrathful energy. There flames a desolation, blazing Before the Thunder's crashing way: Yet, Lord, Thy messengers are praising The gentle movement of Thy Day. THE THREE Though still by them uncomprehended, From these the angels draw their power, And all Thy works, sublime and splendid, Are bright as in Creation's hour. MEPHISTOPHELES Since Thou, O Lord, deign'st to approach again And ask us how we do, in manner kindest, And heretofore to meet myself wert fain, Among Thy menials, now, my face Thou findest. Pardon, this troop I cannot follow after With lofty speech, though by them scorned and spurned: My pathos certainly would move Thy laughter, If Thou hadst not all merriment unlearned. Of suns and worlds I've nothing to be quoted; How men torment themselves, is all I've noted. The little god o' the world sticks to the same old way, And is as whimsical as on Creation's day. Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which Thou hast lent him: He calls it Reason thence his power's increased, To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving Thy Gracious Presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper appears to be, That springing flies, and flying springs, And in the grass the same old ditty sings. Would he still lay among the grass he grows in! Each bit of dung he seeks, to stick his nose in. THE LORD Hast thou, then, nothing more to mention? Com'st ever, thus, with ill intention? Find'st nothing right on earth, eternally? MEPHISTOPHELES No, Lord! I find things, there, still bad as they can be. Man's misery even to pity moves my nature; I've scarce the heart to plague the wretched creature. THE LORD Know'st Faust? MEPHISTOPHELES The Doctor Faust? THE LORD My servant, he! MEPHISTOPHELES Forsooth! He serves you after strange devices: No earthly meat or drink the fool suffices: His spirit's ferment far aspireth; Half conscious of his frenzied, crazed unrest, The fairest stars from Heaven he requireth, From Earth the highest raptures and the best, And all the Near and Far that he desireth Fails to subdue the tumult of his breast. THE LORD Though still confused his service unto Me, I soon shall lead him to a clearer morning. Sees not the gardener, even while buds his tree, Both flower and fruit the future years adorning? MEPHISTOPHELES What will you bet? There's still a chance to gain him, If unto me full leave you give, Gently upon my road to train him! THE LORD As long as he on earth shall live, So long I make no prohibition. While Man's desires and aspirations stir, He cannot choose but err. MEPHISTOPHELES My thanks! I find the dead no acquisition, And never cared to have them in my keeping. I much prefer the cheeks where ruddy blood is leaping, And when a corpse approaches, close my house: It goes with me, as with the cat the mouse. THE LORD Enough! What thou hast asked is granted. Turn off this spirit from his fountain-head; To trap him, let thy snares be planted, And him, with thee, be downward led; Then stand abashed, when thou art forced to say: A good man, through obscurest aspiration, Has still an instinct of the one true way. MEPHISTOPHELES Agreed! But 'tis a short probation. About my bet I feel no trepidation. If I fulfill my expectation, You'll let me triumph with a swelling breast: Dust shall he eat, and with a zest, As did a certain snake, my near relation. THE LORD Therein thou'rt free, according to thy merits; The like of thee have never moved My hate. Of all the bold, denying Spirits, The waggish knave least trouble doth create. Man's active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level; Unqualified repose he learns to crave; Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave, Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil. But ye, God's sons in love and duty, Enjoy the rich, the ever-living Beauty! Creative Power, that works eternal schemes, Clasp you in bonds of love, relaxing never, And what in wavering apparition gleams Fix in its place with thoughts that stand forever! (Heaven closes: the ARCHANGELS separate.) MEPHISTOPHELES (solus) I like, at times, to hear The Ancient's word, And have a care to be most civil: It's really kind of such a noble Lord So humanly to gossip with the Devil! Faust Faust FIRST PART OF THE TRAGEDY I ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN ,

328:Metempsychosis DRAMATIS PERSONAE. ST. JOHN _a Presidential Candidate_ MCDONALD _a Defeated Aspirant_ MRS. HAYES _an Ex-President_ PITTS-STEVENS _a Water Nymph_ _Scene_-A Small Lake in the Alleghany Mountains. ST. JOHN: Hours I've immersed my muzzle in this tarn And, quaffing copious potations, tried To suck it dry; but ever as I pumped Its waters into my distended skin The labor of my zeal extruded them In perspiration from my pores; and so, Rilling the marginal declivity, They fell again into their source. Ah, me! Could I but find within these ancient hills Some long extinct volcano, by the rains Of countless ages in its crater brimmed Like a full goblet, I would lay me down Prone on the outer slope, and o'er its edge Arching my neck, I'd siphon out its store And flood the valleys with my sweat for aye. So should I be accounted as a god, Even as Father Nilus is. What's that? Methought I heard some sawyer draw his file With jarring, stridulous cacophany Across his notchy blade, to set its teeth And mine on edge. Ha! there it goes again! _Song, within_. Cold water's the milk of the mountains, And Nature's our wet-nurse. O then, Glue thou thy blue lips to her fountains Forever and ever, amen! 345 ST. JOHN: Why surely there's congenial company Aloof-the spirit, I suppose, that guards This sacred spot; perchance some water-nymph Who laving in the crystal flood her limbs Has taken cold, and so, with raucous voice Afflicts the sensitive membrane of mine ear The while she sings my sentiments. _(Enter Pitts-Stevens.)_ Hello! What fiend is this? PITTS-STEVENS: 'Tis I, be not afraid. ST. JOHN: And who, thou antiquated crone, art thou? I ne'er forget a face, but names I can't So well remember. I have seen thee oft. When in the middle season of the night, Curved with a cucumber, or knotted hard With an eclectic pie, I've striven to keep My head and heels asunder, thou has come, With sociable familiarity, Into my dream, but not, alas, to bless. PITTS-STEVENS: My name's Pitts-Stevens, age just seventeen years; Talking teetotaler, professional Beauty. ST. JOHN: What dost them here? PITTS-STEVENS: 346 I'm come, fair sir, With paint and brush to blazon on these rocks The merits of my master's nostrum-so: _(Paints rapidly.)_ 'McDonald's Vinegar Bitters!' ST. JOHN: What are they? PITTS-STEVENS: A woman suffering from widowhood Took a full bottle and was cured. A man There was-a murderer; the doctors all Had given him up-he'd but an hour to live. He swallowed half a glassful. He is dead, But not of Vinegar Bitters. A wee babe Lay sick and cried for it. The mother gave That innocent a spoonful and it smoothed Its pathway to the tomb. 'Tis warranted To cause a boy to strike his father, make A pig squeal, start the hair upon a stone, Or play the fiddle for a country dance. _(Enter McDonald, reading a Sunday-school book.)_ Good morrow, sir; I trust you're well. MCDONALD: H'lo, Pitts! Observe, good friends, I have a volume here Myself am author of-a noble book To train the infant mind (delightful task!) It tells how one Samantha Brown, age, six, A gutter-bunking slave to rum, was saved By Vinegar Bitters, went to church and now Has an account at the Pacific Bank. I'll read the whole work to you. ST JOHN: Heaven forbid! I've elsewhere an engagement. 347 PITTS-STEVENS: I am deaf. MCDONALD _(reading regardless):_ 'Once on a time there lived'-_(Enter Mrs. Hayes.)_ Behold our queen! ALL: Her eyes upon the ground Before her feet she low'rs, Walking, in thought profound, As 'twere, upon all fours. Her visage is austere, Her gait a high parade; At every step you hear The sloshing lemonade! MRS. HAYES _(to herself):_ Once, sitting in the White House, hard at work Signing State papers (Rutherford was there, Knitting some hose) a sudden glory fell Upon my paper. I looked up and saw An angel, holding in his hand a rod Wherewith he struck me. Smarting with the blow I rose and (cuffing Rutherford) inquired: 'Wherefore this chastisement?' The angel said: 'Four years you have been President, and still There's rum!'-then flew to Heaven. Contrite, I swore Such oath as lady Methodist might take, My second term should medicine my first. The people would not have it that way; so I seek some candidate who'll take my soulMy spirit of reform, fresh from my breast, And give me his instead; and thus equipped With my imperious and fiery essence, Drive the Drink-Demon from the land and fill 348 The people up with water till their teeth Are all afloat. (_St. John discovers himself_.) What, _you_? ST. JOHN: Aye, Madam, I'll Swap souls with you and lead the cold sea-green Amphibians of Prohibition on, Pallid of nose and webbed of foot, swim-bladdered, Gifted with gills, invincible! MRS. HAYES: Enough, Stand forth and consummate the interchange. (_While McDonald and Pitts-Stevens modestly turn their backs, the latter blushing a delicate shrimp-pink, St. John and Mrs. Hayes effect an exchange of immortal parts. When the transfer is complete McDonald turns and advances, uncorking a bottle of Vinegar Bitters_.) MCDONALD (_chanting_): Nectar compounded of simples Cocted in Stygian shadesAcids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maidsAcrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,With this I baptize and appoint thee (_to St. John_.) To marshal the vinophobe ranks. In the name of Dambosh I anoint thee (_pours the liquid down St. John's back_.) As King of aquatical cranks! 349 (_The liquid blisters the royal back, and His Majesty starts on a dead run, energetically exclaiming. Exit St. John_.) MRS. HAYES: My soul! My soul! I'll never get it back Unless I follow nimbly on his track. (_Exit Mrs. Hayes_.) PITTS-STEVENS: O my! he's such a beautiful young man! I'll follow, too, and catch him if I can. (_Exit Pitts-Stevens_.) MCDONALD: He scarce is visible, his dust so great! Methinks for so obscure a candidate He runs quite well. But as for ProhibitionI mean myself to hold the first position. (_Produces a pocket flask, topes a cruel quantity of double-distilled thunder-and-lightning out of it, smiles so grimly as to darken all the stage and sings_): Though fortunes vary let all be merry, And then if e'er a disaster befall, At Styx's ferry is Charon's wherry In easy call. Upon a ripple of golden tipple That tipsy ship'll convey you best. To king and cripple, the bottle's the nipple Of Nature's breast! ~ Ambrose Bierce,

329:The Kalevala - Rune Xii KYLLIKKI'S BROKEN VOW. Lemminkainen, artful husband, Reckless hero, Kaukomieli, Constantly beside his young wife., Passed his life in sweet contentment, And the years rolled swiftly onward; Ahti thought not of the battles, Nor Kyllikki of the dances. Once upon a time it happened That the hero, Lemminkainen, Went upon the lake a-fishing, Was not home at early evening, As the cruel night descended; To the village went Kyllikki, To the dance of merry maidens. Who will tell the evil story, Who will bear the information To the husband, Lemminkainen? Ahti's sister tells the story, And the sister's name, Ainikki. Soon she spreads the cruel tidings, Straightway gives the information, Of Kyllikki's perjured honor, These the words Ainikki utters: 'Ahti, my beloved brother, To the village went Kyllikki, To the hall of many strangers, To the plays and village dances, With the young men and the maidens, With the maids of braided tresses, To the halls of joy and pleasure.' Lemminkainen, much dejected, Broken-hearted, flushed with anger, Spake these words in measured accents: 'Mother dear, my gray-haired mother, Wilt thou straightway wash my linen In the blood of poison-serpents, 139 In the black blood of the adder? I must hasten to the combat, To the camp-fires of the Northland, To the battle-fields of Lapland; To the village went Kyllikki, To the play of merry maidens, To the games and village dances, With the maids of braided tresses.' Straightway speaks the wife, Kyllikki: 'My beloved husband, Ahti, Do not go to war, I pray thee. In the evening I lay sleeping, Slumbering I saw in dream-land Fire upshooting from the chimney, Flames arising, mounting skyward, From the windows of this dwelling, From the summits of these rafters, Piercing through our upper chambers, Roaring like the fall of waters, Leaping from the floor and ceiling, Darting from the halls and doorways.' But the doubting Lemminkainen Makes this answer to Kyllikki: 'I discredit dreams or women, Have no faith in vows of maidens! Faithful mother of my being, Hither bring my mail of copper; Strong desire is stirring in me For the cup of deadly combat, For the mead of martial conquest.' This the pleading mother's answer: 'Lemminkainen, son beloved, Do not go to war I pray thee; We have foaming beer abundant, In our vessels beer of barley, Held in casks by oaken spigots; Drink this beer of peace and pleasure, Let us drink of it together.' Spake the hero, Lemminkainen: 'I shall taste no more the viands, In the home of false Kyllikki; Rather would I drink the water 140 From the painted tips of birch-oars; Sweeter far to me the water, Than the beverage of dishonor, At my mother's home and fireside! 'Hither bring my martial doublet, Bring me now the sword of battle, Bring my father's sword of honor; I must go to upper Northland, To the battle-fields of Lapland, There to win me gold and silver.' This the anxious mother's answer: 'My beloved Kaukomieli, We have gold in great abundance, Gold and silver in the store-room; Recently upon the uplands, In the early hours of morning, Toiled the workmen in the corn-fields, Plowed the meadows filled with serpents, When the plowshare raised the cover From a chest of gold and silver, Countless was the gold uncovered, Hid beneath the grassy meadow; This the treasure I have brought thee, Take the countless gold in welcome.' Spake the hero, Lemminkainen: 'Do not wish thy household silver, From the wars I'll earn my silver; Gold and silver from the combat Are to me of greater value Than the wealth thou hast discovered. Bring me now my heavy armor, Bring me too my spear and broadsword; To the Northland I must hasten, To the bloody wars of Lapland, Thither does my pride impel me, Thitherward my heart is turning. 'I have heard a tale of Lapland, Some believe the wondrous story, That a maid in Pimentola Lives that does not care for suitors, Does not care for bearded heroes.' This the aged mother's answer: 141 'Warlike Athi, son beloved, In thy home thou hast Kyllikki, Fairest wife of all the islands; Strange to see two wives abiding In the home of but one husband.' Spake the hero, Lemminkainen: 'To the village runs Kyllikki; Let her run to village dances, Let her sleep in other dwellings, With the village youth find pleasure, With the maids of braided tresses.' Seeks the mother to detain him, Thus the anxious mother answers: 'Do not go, my son beloved, Ignorant of Pohya-witchcraft, To the distant homes of Northland Till thou hast the art of magic, Till thou hast some little wisdom Do not go to fields of battle, To the fires of Northland's children, To the slaughter-fields of Lapland, Till of magic thou art master. There the Lapland maids will charm thee, Turyalanders will bewitch thee, Sing thy visage into charcoal, Head and shoulders to the furnace, Into ashes sing thy fore-arm, Into fire direct thy footsteps.' Spake the warlike Lemminkainen: Wizards often have bewitched me, And the fascinating serpents; Lapland wizards, three in number, On an eve in time of summer, Sitting on a rock at twilight, Not a garment to protect them, Once bewitched me with their magic; This much they have taken from me, This the sum of all my losses: What the hatchet gains from flint-stone, What the auger bores from granite, What the heel chips from the iceberg, And what death purloins from tomb-stones. 142 'Horribly the wizards threatened, Tried to sink me with their magic, In the water of the marshes, In the mud and treacherous quicksand, To my chin in mire and water; But I too was born a hero, Born a hero and magician, Was not troubled by their magic. 'Straightway I began my singing, Sang the archers with their arrows, Sang the spearmen with their weapons, Sang the swordsmen with their poniards, Sang the singers with their singing, The enchanters with their magic, To the rapids of the rivers, To the highest fall of waters, To the all-devouring whirlpool, To the deepest depths of ocean, Where the wizards still are sleeping, Sleeping till the grass shoots upward Through the beards and wrinkled faces, Through the locks of the enchanters, As they sleep beneath the billows.' Still entreats the anxious mother, Still beseeches Lemminkainen, Trying to restrain the hero, While Kyllikki begs forgiveness; This the language of the mother: 'Do not go, my son beloved, To the villages of Northland, Nor to Lapland's frigid borders; Dire misfortune will befall thee, Star of evil settle o'er thee, Lemminkainen's end, destruction. 'Couldst thou speak in tongues a hundred, I could not believe thee able, Through the magic of thy singing, To enchant the sons of Lapland To the bottom of the ocean, Dost not know the Tury-language, Canst but speak the tongue of Suomi, Canst not win by witless magic.' 143 Lemminkainen, reckless hero, Also known as Kaukomieli, Stood beside his mother, combing Out his sable locks and musing, Brushing down his beard, debating, Steadfast still in his decision, Quickly hurls his brush in anger, Hurls it to the wall opposing, Gives his mother final answer, These the words that Ahti uses: 'Dire misfortune will befall me, Some sad fate will overtake me, Evil come to Lemminkainen, When the blood flows from that hair-brush, When blood oozes from those bristles.' Thus the warlike Lemminkainen Goes to never-pleasant Lapland, Heeding not his mother's warning, Heeding not her prohibition. Thus the hero, Kaukomieli, Quick equips himself for warfare, On his head a copper helmet, On his shoulders caps of copper, On his body iron armor, Steel, the belt around his body; As he girds himself for battle, Ahti thus soliloquizing: 'Strong the hero in his armor, Strong indeed in copper helmet, Powerful in mail of iron, Stronger far than any hero On the dismal shores of Lapland, Need not fear their wise enchanters, Need not fear their strongest foemen, Need not fear a war with wizards.' Grasped he then the sword of battle, Firmly grasped the heavy broadsword That Tuoni had been grinding, That the gods had brightly burnished, Thrust it in the leathern scabbard, Tied the scabbard to his armor. How do heroes guard from danger, 144 Where protect themselves from evil? Heroes guard their homes and firesides, Guard their doors, and roofs, and windows, Guard the posts that bold the torch-lights, Guard the highways to the court-yard, Guard the ends of all the gate-ways. Heroes guard themselves from women, Carefully from merry maidens; If in this their strength be wanting, Easy fall the heroes, victims To the snares of the enchanters. Furthermore are heroes watchful Of the tribes of warlike giants, Where the highway doubly branches, On the borders of the blue-rock, On the marshes filled with evil, Near the mighty fall of waters, Near the circling of the whirlpool, Near the fiery springs and rapids. Spake the stout-heart, Lemminkainen: 'Rise ye heroes of the broadsword, Ye, the earth's eternal heroes, From the deeps, ye sickle-bearers, From the brooks, ye crossbow-shooters, Come, thou forest, with thine archers, Come, ye thickets, with your armies, Mountain spirits, with your powers, Come, fell Hisi, with thy horrors, Water-mother, with thy dangers, Come, Wellamo, with thy mermaids, Come, ye maidens from the valleys, Come, ye nymphs from winding rivers, Be protection to this hero, Be his day-and-night companions, Body-guard to Lemminkainen, Thus to blunt the spears of wizards, Thus to dull their pointed arrows, That the spears of the enchanters, That the arrows of the archers, That the weapons of the foemen, May not harm this bearded hero. 'Should this force be insufficient, 145 I can call on other powers, I can call the gods above me, Call the great god of the heavens, Him who gives the clouds their courses, Him who rules through boundless ether, Who directs the march of storm-winds. 'Ukko, thou O God above me, Thou the father of creation, Thou that speakest through the thunder, Thou whose weapon is the lightning, Thou whose voice is borne by ether, Grant me now thy mighty fire-sword, Give me here thy burning arrows, Lightning arrows for my quiver, Thus protect me from all danger, Guard me from the wiles of witches, Guide my feet from every evil, Help me conquer the enchanters, Help me drive them from the Northland; Those that stand in front of battle, Those that fill the ranks behind me, Those around me, those above me, Those beneath me, help me banish,. With their knives, and swords, and cross-bows, With their spears of keenest temper, With their tongues of evil magic; Help me drive these Lapland wizards To the deepest depths of ocean, There to wrestle with Wellamo.' Then the reckless Lemminkainen Whistled loudly for his stallion, Called the racer from the hurdles, Called his brown steed from the pasture, Threw the harness on the courser, Hitched the fleet-foot to the snow-sledge, Leaped upon the highest cross-bench, Cracked his whip above the racer, And the steed flies onward swiftly, Bounds the sleigh upon its journey, And the golden plain re-echoes; Travels one day, then a second, Travels all the next day northward, 146 Till the third day evening brings him To a sorry Northland village, On the dismal shores of Lapland. Here the hero, Lemminkainen, Drove along the lowest highway, Through the streets along the border, To a court-yard in the hamlet, Asked one standing in the doorway: 'Is there one within this dwelling, That can loose my stallion's breastplate, That can lift his heavy collar, That these shafts can rightly lower?' On the floor a babe was playing, And the young child gave this answer: 'There is no one in this dwelling That can loose thy stallion's breastplate, That can lift his heavy collar, That the shafts can rightly lower.' Lemminkainen, not discouraged, Whips his racer to a gallop, Rushes forward through the village, On the middle of the highways, To the court-yard in the centre, Asks one standing in the threshold, Leaning on the penthouse door-posts: 'Is there any one here dwelling That can slip my stallion's bridle, That can loose his leathern breast-straps, That can tend my royal racer?' From the fire-place spake a wizard, From her bench the witch made answer: 'Thou canst find one in this dwelling, That can slip thy courser's bridle, That can loose his heavy breastplate, That can tend thy royal racer. There are here a thousand heroes That can make thee hasten homeward, That can give thee fleet-foot stallions, That can chase thee to thy country, Reckless rascal and magician, To thy home and fellow minstrels, To the uplands of thy father, 147 To the cabins of thy mother, To the work-bench of thy brother, To the dairy or thy sister, Ere the evening star has risen, Ere the sun retires to slumber.' Lemminkainen, little fearing, Gives this answer to the wizard: 'I should slay thee for thy pertness, That thy clatter might be silenced.' Then he whipped his fiery charger, And the steed flew onward swiftly, On the upper of the highways, To the court-yard on the summit. When the reckless Lemminkainen Had approached the upper court-yard, Uttered he the words that follow: 'O thou Hisi, stuff this watch-dog, Lempo, stuff his throat and nostrils, Close the mouth of this wild barker, Bridle well the vicious canine, That the watcher may be silent While the hero passes by him.' Then he stepped within the court-room, With his whip he struck the flooring, From the floor arose a vapor, In the fog appeared a pigmy, Who unhitched the royal racer, From his back removed the harness, Gave the weary steed attention. Then the hero, Lemminkainen, Carefully advanced and listened. No one saw the strange magician, No one heard his cautious footsteps; Heard he songs within the dwelling, Through the moss-stuffed chinks heard voices. Through the walls he beard them singing, Through the doors the peals of laughter. Then he spied within the court-rooms, Lurking slyly in the hall-ways, Found the court-rooms filled with singers, By the walls were players seated, Near the doors the wise men hovered, 148 Skilful ones upon the benches, Near the fires the wicked wizards; All were singing songs of Lapland, Singing songs of evil Hisi. Now the minstrel, Lemminkainen, Changes both his form and stature, Passes through the inner door-ways, Enters he the spacious court-hall, And these words the hero utters: 'Fine the singing quickly ending, Good the song that quickly ceases; Better far to keep thy wisdom Than to sing it on the house-tops.' Comes the hostess of Pohyola, Fleetly rushing through the door-way, To the centre of the court-room, And addresses thus the stranger: Formerly a dog lay watching, Was a cur of iron-color, Fond of flesh, a bone-devourer, Loved to lick the blood of strangers. Who then art thou of the heroes, Who of all the host of heroes, That thou art within my court-rooms, That thou comest to my dwelling, Was not seen without my portals, Was not scented by my watch-dogs? Spake the reckless Lemminkainen: 'Do not think that I come hither Having neither wit nor wisdom, Having neither art nor power, Wanting in ancestral knowledge, Lacking prudence of the fathers, That thy watch-dogs may devour me. 'My devoted mother washed me, When a frail and tender baby, Three times in the nights of summer, Nine times in the nights of autumn, That upon my journeys northward I might sing the ancient wisdom, Thus protect myself from danger; When at home I sing as wisely 149 As the minstrels of thy hamlet.' Then the singer, Lemminkainen, Ancient hero, Kaukomieli, Quick began his incantations, Straightway sang the songs of witchcraft, From his fur-robe darts the lightning, Flames outshooting from his eye-balls, From the magic of his singing From his wonderful enchantment. Sang the very best of singers To the very worst of minstrels, Filled their mouths with dust and ashes, Piled the rocks upon their shoulders, Stilled the best of Lapland witches, Stilled the sorcerers and wizards. Then he banished all their heroes, Banished all their proudest minstrels, This one hither, that one thither, To the lowlands poor in verdure, To the unproductive uplands, To the oceans wanting whiting, To the waterfalls of Rutya, To the whirlpool hot and flaming, To the waters decked with sea-foam, Into fires and boiling waters, Into everlasting torment. Then the hero, Lemminkainen, Sang the foemen with their broadswords? Sang the heroes with their weapons, Sang the eldest, sang the youngest, Sang the middle-aged, enchanted; Only one he left his senses, He a poor, defenseless shepherd, Old and sightless, halt and wretched, And the old man's name was Nasshut. Spake the miserable shepherd: 'Thou hast old and young enchanted, Thou hast banished all our heroes, Why hast spared this wretched shepherd?' This is Lemminkainen's answer: 'Therefore have I not bewitched thee: Thou art old, and blind, and wretched 150 Feeble-minded thou, and harmless, Loathsome now without my magic. Thou didst, in thy better life-time, When a shepherd filled with malice, Ruin all thy mother's berries, Make thy sister, too unworthy, Ruin all thy brother's cattle, Drive to death thy father's stallions, Through the marshes, o'er the meadows, Through the lowlands, o'er the mountains, Heeding not thy mother's counsel.' Thereupon the wretched Nasshut, Angry grew and swore for vengeance, Straightway limping through the door-way, Hobbled on beyond the court-yard, O'er the meadow-lands and pastures, To the river of the death-land, To the holy stream and whirlpool, To the kingdom of Tuoni, To the islands of Manala; Waited there for Kaukomieli, Listened long for Lemminkainen, Thinking he must pass this river On his journey to his country, On. the highway to the islands, From the upper shores of Pohya, From the dreary Sariola. ~ Elias Lönnrot,

330:The White Cliffs I have loved England, dearly and deeply, Since that first morning, shining and pure, The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply Out of the sea that once made her secure. I had no thought then of husband or lover, I was a traveller, the guest of a week; Yet when they pointed 'the white cliffs of Dover', Startled I found there were tears on my cheek. I have loved England, and still as a stranger, Here is my home and I still am alone. Now in her hour of trial and danger, Only the English are really her own. II It happened the first evening I was there. Some one was giving a ball in Belgrave Square. At Belgrave Square, that most Victorian spot.— Lives there a novel-reader who has not At some time wept for those delightful girls, Daughters of dukes, prime ministers and earls, In bonnets, berthas, bustles, buttoned basques, Hiding behind their pure Victorian masks Hearts just as hot - hotter perhaps than those Whose owners now abandon hats and hose? Who has not wept for Lady Joan or Jill Loving against her noble parent's will A handsome guardsman, who to her alarm Feels her hand kissed behind a potted palm At Lady Ivry's ball the dreadful night Before his regiment goes off to fight; And see him the next morning, in the park, Complete in busbee, marching to embark. I had read freely, even as a child, Not only Meredith and Oscar Wilde But many novels of an earlier day— Ravenshoe, Can You Forgive Her?, Vivien Grey, Ouida, The Duchess, Broughton's Red As a Rose, Guy Livingstone, Whyte-Melville— Heaven knows 74 What others. Now, I thought, I was to see Their habitat, though like the Miller of Dee, I cared for none and no one cared for me. III A light blue carpet on the stair And tall young footmen everywhere, Tall young men with English faces Standing rigidly in their places, Rows and rows of them stiff and staid In powder and breeches and bright gold braid; And high above them on the wall Hung other English faces-all Part of the pattern of English life— General Sir Charles, and his pretty wife, Admirals, Lords-Lieutenant of Shires, Men who were served by these footmen's sires At their great parties-none of them knowing How soon or late they would all be going In plainer dress to a sterner strifeAnother pattern of English life. I went up the stairs between them all, Strange and frightened and shy and small, And as I entered the ballroom door, Saw something I had never seen before Except in portraits— a stout old guest With a broad blue ribbon across his breast— That blue as deep as the southern sea, Bluer than skies can ever be— The Countess of Salisbury—Edward the Third— No damn merit— the Duke— I heard My own voice saying; 'Upon my word, The garter!' and clapped my hands like a child. Some one beside me turned and smiled, And looking down at me said: 'I fancy, You're Bertie's Australian cousin Nancy. He toId me to tell you that he'd be late At the Foreign Office and not to wait Supper for him, but to go with me, 75 And try to behave as if I were he.' I should have told him on the spot That I had no cousin—that I was not Australian Nancy—that my name Was Susan Dunne, and that I came From a small white town on a deep-cut bay In the smallest state in the U.S.A. I meant to tell him, but changed my mind— I needed a friend, and he seemed kind; So I put my gloved hand into his glove, And we danced together— and fell in love. IV Young and in love-how magical the phrase! How magical the fact! Who has not yearned Over young lovers when to their amaze They fall in love and find their love returned, And the lights brighten, and their eyes are clear To see God's image in their common clay. Is it the music of the spheres they hear? Is it the prelude to that noble play, The drama of Joined Lives? Ah, they forget They cannot write their parts; the bell has rung, The curtain rises and the stage is set For tragedy-they were in love and young. We went to the Tower, We went to the Zoo, We saw every flower In the gardens at Kew. We saw King Charles a-prancing On his long-tailed horse, And thought him more entrancing Than better kings, of course. At a strange early hour, In St. James's palace yard, We watched in a shower The changing of the guard. And I said, what a pity, To have just a week to spend, When London is a city 76 Whose beauties never end! VI When the sun shines on England, it atones For low-hung leaden skies, and rain and dim Moist fogs that paint the verdure on her stones And fill her gentle rivers to the brim. When the sun shines on England, shafts of light Fall on far towers and hills and dark old trees, And hedge-bound meadows of a green as bright— As bright as is the blue of tropic seas. When the sun shines, it is as if the face Of some proud man relaxed his haughty stare, And smiled upon us with a sudden grace, Flattering because its coming is so rare. VII The English are frosty When you're no kith or kin Of theirs, but how they alter When once they take you in! The kindest, the truest, The best friends ever known, It's hard to remember How they froze you to a bone. They showed me all London, Johnnie and his friends; They took me to the country For long week-ends; I never was so happy, I never had such fun, I stayed many weeks in England Instead of just one. VIII John had one of those English faces That always were and will always be Found in the cream of English places Till England herself sink into the sea— A blond, bowed face with prominent eyes A little bit bluer than English skies. You see it in ruffs and suits of armour, 77 You see it in wigs of many styles, Soldier and sailor, judge and farmer— That face has governed the British Isles, By the power, for good or ill bestowed, Only on those who live by code. Oh, that inflexible code of living, That seems so easy and unconstrained, The Englishman's code of taking and giving Rights and privileges pre-ordained, Based since English life began On the prime importance of being a man. IX And what a voice he had-gentle, profound, Clear masculine!—I melted at the sound. Oh, English voices, are there any words Those tones to tell, those cadences to teach! As song of thrushes is to other birds, So English voices are to other speech; Those pure round 'o's '—those lovely liquid 'l's' Ring in the ears like sound of Sabbath bells. Yet I have loathed those voices when the sense Of what they said seemed to me insolence, As if the dominance of the whole nation Lay in that clear correct enunciation. Many years later, I remember when One evening I overheard two men In Claridge's— white waistcoats, coats I know Were built in Bond Street or in Savile Row— So calm, so confident, so finely bred— Young gods in tails— and this is what they said: 'Not your first visit to the States?' 'Oh no, I'd been to Canada two years ago.' Good God, I thought, have they not heard that we Were those queer colonists who would be free, Who took our desperate chance, and fought and won Under a colonist called Washington? One does not lose one's birthright, it appears. 78 I had been English then for many years. We went down to Cambridge, Cambridge in the spring. In a brick court at twilight We heard the thrushes sing, And we went to evening service In the chapel of the King. The library of Trinity, The quadrangle of Clare, John bought a pipe from Bacon, And I acquired there The Anecdotes of Painting From a handcart in the square. The Playing fields at sunset Were vivid emerald green, The elms were tall and mighty, And many youths were seen, Carefree young gentlemen In the Spring of 'Fourteen. XI London, just before dawn-immense and dark— Smell of wet earth and growth from the empty Park, Pall Mall vacant-Whitehall deserted. Johnnie and I Strolling together, averse to saying good-bye— Strolling away from some party in silence profound, Only far off in Mayfair, piercing, the sound Of a footman's whistle—the rhythm of hoofs on wood, Further and further away. . . . And now we stood On a bridge, where a poet came to keep Vigil while all the city lay asleep— Westminster Bridge, and soon the sun would rise, And I should see it with my very eyes! Yes, now it came— a broad and awful glow Out of the violet mists of dawn. 'Ah, no', I said. 'Earth has not anything to show More fair— changed though it is— than this.' A curious background surely for a kiss— Our first— Westminster Bridge at break of day— 79 Settings by Wordsworth, as John used to say. XII Why do we fall in love? I do believe That virtue is the magnet, the small vein Of ore, the spark, the torch that we receive At birth, and that we render back again. That drop of godhood, like a precious stone, May shine the brightest in the tiniest flake. Lavished on saints, to sinners not unknown; In harlot, nun, philanthropist, and rake, It shines for those who love; none else discern Evil from good; Men's fall did not bestow That threatened wisdom; blindly still we yearn After a virtue that we do not know, Until our thirst and longing rise above The barriers of reason—and we love. XIII And still I did not see my life was changed, Utterly different—by this love estranged For ever and ever from my native land; That I was now of that unhappy band Who lose the old, and cannot gain the new However loving and however true To their new duties. I could never be An English woman, there was that in me Puritan, stubborn that would not agree To English standards, though I did not see The truth, because I thought them, good or ill, So great a people—and I think so still. But a day came when I was forced to face Facts. I was taken down to see the place, The family place in Devon— and John's mother. 'Of course, you understand,' he said, 'my brother Will have the place.' He smiled; he was so sure The world was better for primogeniture. And yet he loved that place, as Englishmen Do love their native countryside, and when The day should be as it was sure to be— When this was home no more to him— when he 80 Could go there only when his brother's wife Should ask him—to a room not his— his life Would shrink and lose its meaning. How unjust, I thought. Why do they feel it must Go to that idle, insolent eldest son? Well, in the end it went to neither one. XIV A red brick manor-house in Devon, In a beechwood of old grey trees, Ivy climbing to the clustered chimneys, Rustling in the wet south breeze. Gardens trampled down by Cromwell's army, Orchards of apple-trees and pears, Casements that had looked for the Armada, And a ghost on the stairs. XV Johnnie's mother, the Lady Jean, Child of a penniless Scottish peer, Was handsome, worn high-coloured, lean, With eyes like Johnnie's—more blue and clear— Like bubbles of glass in her fine tanned face. Quiet, she was, and so at ease, So perfectly sure of her rightful place In the world that she felt no need to please. I did not like her—she made me feel Talkative, restless, unsure, as if I were a cross between parrot and eel. I thought her blank and cold and stiff. XVI And presently she said as they Sooner or later always say: 'You're an American, Miss Dunne? Really you do not speak like one.' She seemed to think she'd said a thing Both courteous and flattering. I answered though my wrist were weak With anger: 'Not at all, I speak— At least I've always thought this true— As educated people do 81 In any country-even mine.' 'Really?' I saw her head incline, I saw her ready to assert Americans are easily hurt. XVII Strange to look back to the days So long ago When a friend was almost a foe, When you hurried to find a phrase For your easy light dispraise Of a spirit you did not know, A nature you could not plumb In the moment of meeting, Not guessing a day would come When your heart would ache to hear Other men's tongues repeating Those same light phrases that jest and jeer At a friend now grown so dear— so dear. Strange to remember long ago When a friend was almost a foe. XVIII I saw the house with its oaken stair, And the Tudor Rose on the newel post, The panelled upper gallery where They told me you heard the family ghost— 'A gentle unhappy ghost who sighs Outside one's door on the night one dies.' 'Not,' Lady Jean explained, 'at all Like the ghost at my father's place, St. Kitts, That clanks and screams in the great West Hall And frightens strangers out of their wits.' I smiled politely, not thinking I Would hear one midnight that long sad sigh. I saw the gardens, after our tea (Crumpets and marmalade, toast and cake) And Drake's Walk, leading down to the sea; Lady Jean was startled I'd heard of Drake, For the English always find it a mystery That Americans study English history. 82 I saw the picture of every son— Percy, the eldest, and John; and Bill In Chinese Customs, and the youngest one Peter, the sailor, at Osborne still; And the daughter, Enid, married, alas, To a civil servant in far Madras. A little thing happened, just before We left— the evening papers came; John, flicking them over to find a score, Spoke for the first time a certain name— The name of a town in a distant land Etched on our hearts by a murderer's hand. Mother and son exchanged a glance, A curious glance of strength and dread. I thought: what matter to them if Franz Ferdinand dies? One of them said: This might be serious.' 'Yes, you're right.' The other answered, 'It really might.' XIX Dear John: I'm going home. I write to say Goodbye. My boat-train leaves at break of day; It will be gone when this is in your hands. I've had enough of lovely foreign lands, Sightseeing, strangers, holiday and play; I'm going home to those who think the way I think, and speak as I do. Will you try To understand that this must be good-bye? We both rooted deeply in the soil Of our own countries. But I could not spoil Our happy memories with the stress and strain Of parting; if we never meet again Be sure I shall remember till I die Your love, your laugh, your kindness. But—goodbye. Please do not hate me; give the devil his due, This is an act of courage. Always, Sue. XX The boat-train rattling 83 Through the green country-side; A girl within it battling With her tears and pride. The Southampton landing, Porters, neat and quick, And a young man standing, Leaning on his stick. 'Oh, John, John, you shouldn't Have come this long way. . . 'Did you really think I wouldn't Be here to make you stay?' I can't remember whether There was much stress and strain, But presently, together, We were travelling back again. XXI The English love their country with a love Steady, and simple, wordless, dignified; I think it sets their patriotism above All others. We Americans have pride— We glory in our country's short romance. We boast of it and love it. Frenchmen when The ultimate menace comes, will die for France Logically as they lived. But Englishmen Will serve day after day, obey the law, And do dull tasks that keep a nation strong. Once I remember in London how I saw Pale shabby people standing in a long Line in the twilight and the misty rain To pay their tax. I then saw England plain. XXII Johnnie and I were married. England then Had been a week at war, and all the men Wore uniform, as English people can, Unconscious of it. Percy, the best man, As thin as paper and as smart as paint, Bade us good-by with admirable restraint, Went from the church to catch his train to hell; And died-saving his batman from a shell. 84 XXIII We went down to Devon, In a warm summer rain, Knowing that our happiness Might never come again; I, not forgetting, 'Till death us do part,' Was outrageously happy With death in my heart. Lovers in peacetime With fifty years to live, Have time to tease and quarrel And question what to give; But lovers in wartime Better understand The fullness of living, With death close at hand. XXIV My father wrote me a letter— My father, scholarly, indolent, strong, Teaching Greek better Than high-school students repay— Teaching Greek in the winter, but all summer long Sailing a yawl in Narragansett Bay; Happier perhaps when I was away, Free of an anxious daughter, He could sail blue water Day after day, Beyond Brenton Reef Lightship, and Beavertail, Past Cuttyhunk to catch a gale Off the Cape, while he thought of Hellas and Troy, Chanting with joy Greek choruses— those lines that he said Must be written some day on a stone at his head: 'But who can know As the long years go That to live is happy, has found his heaven.' My father, so far away— I thought of him, in Devon, Anchoring in a blind fog in Booth Bay. 85 XXV 'So, Susan, my dear,' the letter began, 'You've fallen in love with an Englishman. Well, they're a manly, attractive lot, If you happen to like them, which I do not. I am a Yankee through and through, And I don't like them, or the things they do. Whenever it's come to a knock-down fight With us, they were wrong, and we right; If you don't believe me, cast your mind Back over history, what do you find? They certainly had no justification For that maddening plan to impose taxation Without any form of representation. Your man may be all that a man should be, Only don't you bring him back to me Saying he can't get decent tea— He could have got his tea all right In Boston Harbour a certain night, When your great-great-grandmother— also a Sue— Shook enough tea from her husband's shoe To supply her house for a week or two. The war of 1812 seems to me About as just as a war could be. How could we help but come to grips With a nation that stopped and searched our ships, And took off our seamen for no other reason Except that they needed crews that season. I can get angry still at the tale Of their letting the Alabama sail, And Palmerston being insolent To Lincoln and Seward over the Trent. All very long ago, you'll say, But whenever I go up Boston-way, I drive through Concord—that neck of the wood, Where once the embattled farmers stood, And I think of Revere, and the old South Steeple, And I say, by heck, we're the only people Who licked them not only once, but twice. Never forget it-that's my advice. They have their points—they're honest and brave, Loyal and sure—as sure as the grave; 86 They make other nations seem pale and flighty, But they do think England is god almighty, And you must remind them now and then That other countries breed other men. From all of which you will think me rather Unjust. I am. Your devoted Father. XXVI I read, and saw my home with sudden yearning— The small white wooden house, the grass-green door, My father's study with the fire burning, And books piled on the floor. I saw the moon-faced clock that told the hours, The crimson Turkey carpet, worn and frayed, The heavy dishes—gold with birds and flowers— Fruits of the China trade. I saw the jack o' lanterns, friendly, frightening, Shine from our gateposts every Hallow-e'en; I saw the oak tree, shattered once by lightning, Twisted, stripped clean. I saw the Dioscuri— two black kittens, Stalking relentlessly an empty spool; I saw a little girl in scarlet mittens Trudging through snow to school. XXVII John read the letter with his lovely smile. 'Your father has a vigorous English style, And what he says is true, upon my word; But what's this war of which I never heard? We didn't fight in 1812.' 'Yes, John, That was the time when you burnt Washington.' 'We couldn't have, my dear. . .' 'I mean the city.' 'We burnt it?' 'Yes, you did.' 'What a pity! No wonder people hate us. But, I say, I'll make your father like me yet, some day.' XXVIII I settled down in Devon, When Johnnie went to France. Such a tame ending 87 To a great romance— Two lonely women With nothing much to do But get to know each other; She did and I did, too. Mornings at the rectory Learning how to roll Bandages, and always Saving light and coal. Oh, that house was bitter As winter closed in, In spite of heavy stockings And woollen next the skin. I was cold and wretched, And never unaware Of John more cold and wretched In a trench out there. XXIX All that long winter I wanted so much to complain, But my mother-in-Iaw, as far as I could see, Felt no such impulse, though she was always in pain, An, as the winter fogs grew thick, Took to walking with a stick, Heavily. Those bubble-like eyes grew black Whenever she rose from a chair— Rose and fell back, Unable to bear The sure agonizing Torture of rising. Her hands, those competent bony hands, Grew gnarled and old, But never ceased to obey the commands Of her will— only finding new hold Of bandage and needle and pen. And not for the blinking Of an eye did she ever stop thinking Of the suffering of Englishmen And her two sons in the trenches. Now and then I could forget for an instant in a book or a letter, But she never, never forgot— either one— 88 Percy and John—though I knew she loved one better— Percy, the wastrel, the gambler, the eldest son. I think I shall always remember Until I die Her face that day in December, When in a hospital ward together, she and I Were writing letters for wounded men and dying, Writing and crying Over their words, so silly and simple and loving, Suddenly, looking up, I saw the old Vicar moving Like fate down the hospital ward, until He stood still Beside her, where she sat at a bed. 'Dear friend, come home. I have tragic news,' he said She looked straight at him without a spasm of fear, Her face not stern or masked— 'Is it Percy or John?' she asked. 'Percy.' She dropped her eyes. 'I am needed here. Surely you know I cannot go Until every letter is written. The dead Must wait on the living,' she said. 'This is my work. I must stay.' And she did— the whole long day. XXX Out of the dark, and dearth Of happiness on earth, Out of a world inured to death and pain; On a fair spring mom To me a son was born, And hope was born-the future lived again. To me a son was born, The lonely hard forlorn Travail was, as the Bible tells, forgot. How old, how commonplace To look upon the face Of your first-born, and glory in your lot. To look upon his face And understand your place Among the unknown dead in churchyards lying, 89 To see the reason why You lived and why you die— Even to find a certain grace in dying. To know the reason why Buds blow and blossoms die, Why beauty fades, and genius is undone, And how unjustified Is any human pride In all creation— save in this common one. XXXI Maternity is common, but not so It seemed to me. Motherless, I did not know— I was all unprepared to feel this glow, Holy as a Madonna's, and as crude As any animal's beatitude— Crude as my own black cat's, who used to bring Her newest litter to me every spring, And say, with green eyes shining in the sun: 'Behold this miracle that I have done.' And John came home on leave, and all was joy And thankfulness to me, because my boy Was not a baby only, but the heir— Heir to the Devon acres and a name As old as England. Somehow I became Almost an English woman, almost at one With all they ever did— all they had done. XXXII 'I want him called John after you, or if not that I'd rather—' 'But the eldest son is always called Percy, dear.' 'I don't ask to call him Hiram, after my father—' 'But the eldest son is always called Percy, dear.' 'But I hate the name Percy. I like Richard or Ronald, Or Peter like your brother, or Ian or Noel or Donald—' 'But the eldest is always called Percy, dear.' So the Vicar christened him Percy; and Lady Jean Gave to the child and me the empty place In hr heart. Poor Lady, it was as if she had seen The world destroyed— the extinction of her race, Her country, her class, her name— and now she saw 90 Them live again. And I would hear her say: 'No. I admire Americans; my daughter-in-law Was an American.' Thus she would well repay The debt, and I was grateful— the English made Life hard for those who did not come to her aid. XXXIII 'They must come in in the spring.' 'Don't they care sixpence who's right?' 'What a ridiculous thing— Saying they're too proud to fight.' 'Saying they're too proud to fight.' 'Wilson's pro-German, I'm told.' 'No, it's financial.' 'Oh, quite, All that they care for is gold.' 'All that they care for is gold.' 'Seem to like writing a note.' 'Yes, as a penman, he's bold.' 'No. It's the Irish vote.' 'Oh, it's the Irish vote.' 'What if the Germans some night Sink an American boat?' 'Darling, they're too proud to fight.' XXXIV What could I do, but ache and long That my country, peaceful, rich, and strong, Should come and do battle for England's sake. What could I do, but long and ache. And my father's letters I hid away Lest some one should know the things he'd say. 'You ask me whether we're coming in— We are. The English are clever as sin, Silently, subtly they inspire Most of youth with a holy fire To shed their blood for the British Empire We'll come in— we'll fight and die Humbly to help them, and by and by, England will do us in the eye. They'll get colonies, gold and fame, And we'll get nothing at all but blame. 91 Blame for not having come before, Blame for not having sent them more Money and men and war supplies, Blame if we venture to criticise. We're so damn simple— our skins so thin We'll get nothing whatever, but we'll come in.' XXXV And at last—at last—like the dawn of a calm, fair day After a night of terror and storm, they came— My young light-hearted countrymen, tall and gay, Looking the world over in search of fun and fame, Marching through London to the beat of a boastful air, Seeing for the first time Piccadilly and Leicester Square, All the bands playing: 'Over There, Over There, Send the word, send the word to beware—' And as the American flag went fluttering by Englishmen uncovered, and I began to cry. XXXVI 'We're here to end it, by jingo.' 'We'll lick the Heinies okay.' 'I can't get on to the lingo.' 'Dumb-they don't get what we say.' 'Call that stuff coffee? You oughter Know better. Gee, take it away.' 'Oh, for a drink of ice water! ' 'They think nut-sundae's a day.' 'Say, is this chicken feed money?' 'Say, does it rain every day?' 'Say, Lady, isn't it funny Every one drives the wrong way?' XXXVII How beautiful upon the mountains, How beautiful upon the downs, How beautiful in the village post-office, On the pavements of towns— How beautiful in the huge print of newspapers, Beautiful while telegraph wires hum, While telephone bells wildly jingle, 92 The news that peace has come— That peace has come at last—that all wars cease. How beautiful upon the mountains are the footsteps Of the messengers of peace! XXXVIII In the depth of the night betwixt midnight and morning, In the darkness and silence forerunning the dawn, The throb of my heart was a drum-beat of warning, My ears were a-strain and my breath was undrawn. In the depth of the night, when the old house was sleeping, I lying alone in a desolate bed, Heard soft on the staircase a slow footstep creeping— The ear of the living—the step of the dead. In the depth of the night betwixt midnight and morning A step drawing near on the old oaken floor— On the stair— in the gallery— the ghost that gives warning Of death, by that heartbreaking sigh at my door. XXXIX Bad news is not broken, By kind tactful word; The message is spoken Ere the word can be heard. The eye and the bearing, The breath make it clear, And the heart is despairing Before the ears hear. I do not remember The words that they said: 'Killed—Douai—November—' I knew John was dead. All done and over— That day long ago— The while cliffs of Dover— Little did I know. XL As I grow older, looking back, I see Not those the longest planted in the heart Are the most missed. Some unions seem to be Too close for even death to tear apart. 93 Those who have lived together many years, And deeply learnt to read each other's mind, Vanities, tempers, virtues, hopes, and fears— One cannot go—nor is one left behind. Alas, with John and me this was not so; I was defrauded even of the past. Our days had been so pitifully few, Fight as I would, I found the dead go fast. I had lost all—had lost not love alone, But the bright knowledge it had been my own. XLI Oh, sad people, buy not your past too dearly, Live not in dreams of the past, for understand, If you remember too much, too long, too clearly, If you grasp memory with too heavy a hand, You will destroy memory in all its glory For the sake of the dreams of your head upon your bed. You will be left with only the worn dead story You told yourself of the dead. XLII Nanny brought up my son, as his father before him, Austere on questions of habits, manners, and food. Nobly yielding a mother's right to adore him, Thinking that mothers never did sons much good. A Scot from Lady Jean's own native passes, With a head as smooth and round as a silver bowl, A crooked nose, and eyes behind her glasses Grey and bright and wise—a great soul ! Ready to lay down her life for her charge, and ready To administer discipline without consulting me: 'Is that the way for you to answer my leddy? I think you'll get no sweet tonight to your tea.' Bringing him up better than I could do it, Teaching him to be civil and manly and cool In the face of danger. And then before I knew it The time came for him to go off to school. Off to school to be free of women's teaching, Into a world of men— at seven years old; 94 Into a world where a mother's hands vainly reaching Will never again caress and comfort and hold. XLIII My father came over now and then To look at the boy and talk to me, Never staying long, For the urge was strong To get back to his yawl and the summer sea. He came like a nomad passing by, Hands in his pockets, hat over one eye, Teasing every one great and small With a blank straight face and a Yankee drawl; Teasing the Vicar on Apostolic Succession And what the Thirty-Nine Articles really meant to convey, Teasing Nanny, though he did not Make much impression On that imperturbable Scot. Teasing our local grandee, a noble peer, Who firmly believed the Ten Lost Tribes Of Israel had settled here— A theory my father had at his fingers' ends— Only one person was always safe from his jibes— My mother-in-law, for they were really friends. XLIV Oh, to come home to your country After long years away, To see the tall shining towers Rise over the rim of the bay, To feel the west wind steadily blowing And the sunshine golden and hot, To speak to each man as an equal, Whether he is or not. XLV Was this America—this my home? Prohibition and Teapot Dome— Speakeasies, night-clubs, illicit stills, Dark faces peering behind dark grills, Hold-ups, kidnappings, hootch or booze— Every one gambling—you just can't lose, 95 Was this my country? Even the bay At home was altered, strange ships lay At anchor, deserted day after day, Old yachts in a rusty dim decay— Like ladies going the primrose way— At anchor, until when the moon was black, They sailed, and often never came back. Even my father's Puritan drawl Told me shyly he'd sold his yawl For a fabulous price to the constable's son— My childhood's playmate, thought to be one Of a criminal gang, rum-runners all, Such clever fellows with so much money— Even the constable found it funny, Until one morning his son was found, Floating dead in Long Island Sound. Was this my country? It seemed like heaven To get back, dull and secure, to Devon, Loyally hiding from Lady Jean And my English friends the horrors I'd seen. XLVI That year she died, my nearest, dearest friend; Lady Jean died, heroic to the end. The family stood about her grave, but none Mourned her as I did. After, one by one, They slipped away—Peter and Bill—my son Went back to school. I hardly was aware Of Percy's lovely widow, sitting there In the old room, in Lady Jean's own chair. An English beauty glacially fair Was Percy's widow Rosamund, her hair Was silver gilt, and smooth as silk, and fine, Her eyes, sea-green, slanted away from mine, From any one's, as if to meet the gaze Of others was too intimate a phase For one as cool and beautiful as she. We were not friends or foes. She seemed to be Always a little irked— fretted to find That other women lived among mankind. 96 Now for the first time after years of meeting, Never exchanging more than formal greeting, She spoke to me— that sharp determined way People will speak when they have things to say. XLVII ROSAMUND: Susan, go home with your offspring. Fly. Live in America. SUSAN: Rosamund, why? ROSAMUND: Why, my dear girl, haven't you seen What English country life can mean With too small an income to keep the place Going? Already I think I trace A change in you, you no longer care So much how you look or what you wear. That coat and skirt you have on, you know You wouldn't have worn them ten years ago. Those thick warm stockings— they make me sad, Your ankles were ankles to drive men mad. Look at your hair— you need a wave. Get out— go home— be hard— be brave, Or else, believe me, you'll be a slave. There's something in you— dutiful— meek— You'll be saving your pin-money every week To mend the roof. Well, let it leak. Why should you care? SUSAN: But I do care, John loved this place and my boy's the heir. ROSAMUND: The heir to what? To a tiresome life Drinking tea with the vicar's wife, Opening bazaars, and taking the chair At meetings for causes that you don't care Sixpence about and never will; Breaking your heart over every bill. I've been in the States, where everyone, Even the poor, have a little fun. Don't condemn your son to be A penniless country squire. He Would be happier driving a tram over there Than mouldering his life away as heir. SUSAN: Rosamund dear, this may all be true. I'm an American through and through. 97 I don't see things as the English do, But it's clearly my duty, it seems to me, To bring up John's son, like him, to be A country squire—poor alas, But true to that English upper class That does not change and does not pass. ROSAMUND: Nonsense; it's come to an absolute stop. Twenty years since we sat on top Of the world, amusing ourselves and sneering At other manners and customs, jeering At other nations, living in clover— Not any more. That's done and over. No one nowadays cares a button For the upper classes— they're dead as mutton. Go home. SUSAN: I notice that you don't go. ROSAMUND: My dear, that shows how little you know. I'm escaping the fate of my peers, Marrying one of the profiteers, Who hasn't an 'aitch' where an 'aitch' should be, But millions and millions to spend on me. Not much fun— but there wasn't any Other way out. I haven't a penny. But with you it's different. You can go away, And oh, what a fool you'd be to stay. XLVIII Rabbits in the park, Scuttling as we pass, Little white tails Against the green grass. 'Next time, Mother, I must really bring a gun, I know you don't like shooting, But—!' John's own son, That blond bowed face, Those clear steady eyes, Hard to be certain That the dead don't rise. Jogging on his pony Through the autumn day, 98 'Bad year for fruit, Mother, But good salt hay.' Bowling for the village As his father had before; Coming home at evening To read the cricket score, Back to the old house Where all his race belong, Tired and contented— Rosamund was wrong. XLIX If some immortal strangers walked our land And heard of death, how could they understand That we—doomed creatures—draw our meted breath Light-heartedly—all unconcerned with death. So in these years between the wars did men From happier continents look on us when They brought us sympathy, and saw us stand Like the proverbial ostrich-head in sand— While youth passed resolutions not to fight, And statesmen muttered everything was right— Germany, a kindly, much ill-treated nation— Russia was working out her own salvation Within her borders. As for Spain, ah, Spain Would buy from England when peace came again! I listened and believed— believed through sheer Terror. I could not look whither my fear Pointed— that agony that I had known. I closed my eyes, and was not alone. Later than many, earlier than some, I knew the die was cast— that war must come; That war must come. Night after night I lay Steeling a broken heart to face the day When he, my son— would tread the very same Path that his father trod. When the day came I was not steeled— not ready. Foolish, wild Words issued from my lips— 'My child, my child, Why should you die for England too?' He smiled: 'Is she not worth it, if I must?' he said. 99 John would have answered yes— but John was dead. Is she worth dying for? My love, my one And only love had died, and now his son Asks me, his alien mother, to assay The worth of England to mankind today— This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea— Ah, no, not that—not Shakespeare—I must be A sterner critic. I must weigh the ill Against the good, must strike the balance, till I know the answer— true for me alone— What is she worth— this country— not my own? I thought of my father's deep traditional wrath Against England— the redcoat bully— the ancient foe— That second reaping of hate, that aftermath Of a ruler's folly and ignorance long ago— Long, long ago— yet who can honestly say England is utterly changed— not I— not I. Arrogance, ignorance, folly are here today, And for these my son must die? I thought of these years, these last dark terrible years When the leaders of England bade the English believe Lies at the price of peace, lies and fears, Lies that corrupt, and fears that sap and deceive. I though of the bars dividing man from man, Invisible bars that the humble may not pass, And how no pride is uglier, crueller than The pride unchecked of class. Oh, those invisible bars of manners and speech, Ways that the proud man will not teach The humble lest they too reach Those splendid heights where a little band Have always stood and will always stand Ruling the fate of this small green land, Rulers of England—for them must I Send out my only son to die? 100 LI And then, and then, I thought of Elizabeth stepping down Over the stones of Plymouth town To welcome her sailors, common men, She herself, as she used to say, Being' mere English' as much as they— Seafaring men who sailed away From rocky inlet and wooded bay, Free men, undisciplined, uncontrolled, Some of them pirates and all of them bold, Feeling their fate was England's fate, Coming to save it a little late, Much too late for the easy way, Much too late, and yet never quite Too late to win in that last worst fight. And I thought of Hampden and men like him, St John and Eliot, Cromwell and Pym, Standing firm through the dreadful years, When the chasm was opening, widening, Between the Commons and the King; I thought of the Commons in tears— in tears, When Black Rod knocked at Parliament's door, And they saw Rebellion straight before— Weeping, and yet as hard as stone, Knowing what the English have always known Since then— and perhaps have known alone— Something that none can teach or tell— The moment when God's voice says; 'Rebel.' Not to rise up in sudden gust Of passion— not, though the cause be just; Not to submit so long that hate, Lava torrents break out and spill Over the land in a fiery spate; Not to submit for ever, until The will of the country is one man's will, And every soul in the whole land shrinks From thinking—except as his neighbour thinks. Men who have governed England know 101 That dreadful line that they may not pass And live. Elizabeth long ago Honoured and loved, and bold as brass, Daring and subtle, arrogant, clever, English, too, to her stiff backbone, Somewhat a bully, like her own Father— yet even Elizabeth never Dared to oppose the sullen might Of the English, standing upon a right. LII And were they not English, our forefathers, never more English than when they shook the dust of her sod From their feet for ever, angrily seeking a shore Where in his own way a man might worship his God. Never more English than when they dared to be Rebels against her-that stern intractable sense Of that which no man can stomach and still be free, Writing: 'When in the course of human events. . .' Writing it out so all the world could see Whence come the powers of all just governments. The tree of Liberty grew and changed and spread, But the seed was English. I am American bred, I have seen much to hate here— much to forgive, But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live. ~ Alice Duer Miller,

331:No more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk. A final glass for me, though: cool, i' faith! We ought to have our Abbey back, you see. It's different, preaching in basilicas, And doing duty in some masterpiece Like this of brother Pugin's, bless his heart! I doubt if they're half baked, those chalk rosettes, Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere; It's just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh? These hot long ceremonies of our church Cost us a littleoh, they pay the price, You take meamply pay it! Now, we'll talk. So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs. No deprecation,nay, I beg you, sir! Beside 't is our engagement: don't you know, I promised, if you'd watch a dinner out, We'd see truth dawn together?truth that peeps Over the glasses' edge when dinners done.                     And body gets its sop and holds its noise And leaves soul free a little. Now's the time: 'T is break of day! You do despise me then. And if I say, "despise me,"never fear! I know you do not in a certain sense Not in my arm-chair, for example: here, I well imagine you respect my place ( Status, entourage , worldly circumstance) Quite to its valuevery much indeed: Are up to the protesting eyes of you In pride at being seated here for once You'll turn it to such capital account! When somebody, through years and years to come, Hints of the bishop,names methat's enough: "Blougram? I knew him"(into it you slide) "Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day, "All alone, we two; he's a clever man: "And after dinner,why, the wine you know, "Oh, there was wine, and good!what with the wine . . "'Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk! "He's no bad fellow, Blougram; he had seen "Something of mine he relished, some review: "He's quite above their humbug in his heart, "Half-said as much, indeedthe thing's his trade. "I warrant, Blougram's sceptical at times: "How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!"                      Che che , my dear sir, as we say at Rome, Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take; You have had your turn and spoken your home-truths: The hand's mine now, and here you follow suit. Thus much conceded, still the first fact stays You do despise me; your ideal of life Is not the bishop's: you would not be I. You would like better to be Goethe, now, Or Buonaparte, or, bless me, lower still, Count D'Orsay,so you did what you preferred, Spoke as you thought, and, as you cannot help, Believed or disbelieved, no matter what, So long as on that point, whate'er it was, You loosed your mind, were whole and sole yourself. That, my ideal never can include, Upon that element of truth and worth Never be based! for say they make me Pope (They can'tsuppose it for our argument!) Why, there I'm at my tether's end, I've reached My height, and not a height which pleases you: An unbelieving Pope won't do, you say. It's like those eerie stories nurses tell, Of how some actor on a stage played Death, With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart, And called himself the monarch of the world;                       Then, going in the tire-room afterward, Because the play was done, to shift himself, Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly, The moment he had shut the closet door, By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope At unawares, ask what his baubles mean, And whose part he presumed to play just now? Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true! So, drawing comfortable breath again, You weigh and find, whatever more or less I boast of my ideal realized, Is nothing in the balance when opposed To your ideal, your grand simple life, Of which you will not realize one jot. I am much, you are nothing; you would be all, I would be merely much: you beat me there. No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why! The common problem, yours, mine, every one's, Isnot to fancy what were fair in life Provided it could be,but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair Up to our means: a very different thing! No abstract intellectual plan of life Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws,                        But one, a man, who is man and nothing more, May lead within a world which (by your leave) Is Rome or London, not Fool's-paradise. Embellish Rome, idealize away, Make paradise of London if you can, You're welcome, nay, you're wise. A simile! We mortals cross the ocean of this world Each in his average cabin of a life; The best's not big, the worst yields elbow-room. Now for our six months' voyagehow prepare? You come on shipboard with a landsman's list Of things he calls convenient: so they are! An India screen is pretty furniture, A piano-forte is a fine resource, All Balzac's novels occupy one shelf, The new edition fifty volumes long; And little Greek books, with the funny type They get up well at Leipsic, fill the next: Go on! slabbed marble, what a bath it makes! And Parma's pride, the Jerome, let us add! 'T were pleasant could Correggio's fleeting glow Hang full in face of one where'er one roams, Since he more than the others brings with him Italy's self,the marvellous Modenese!                        Yet was not on your list before, perhaps. Alas, friend, here's the agent . . . is't the name? The captain, or whoever's master here You see him screw his face up; what's his cry Ere you set foot on shipboard? "Six feet square!" If you won't understand what six feet mean, Compute and purchase stores accordingly And if, in pique because he overhauls Your Jerome, piano, bath, you come on board Barewhy, you cut a figure at the first While sympathetic landsmen see you off; Not afterward, when long ere half seas over, You peep up from your utterly naked boards Into some snug and well-appointed berth, Like mine for instance (try the cooler jug Put back the other, but don't jog the ice!) And mortified you mutter "Well and good; "He sits enjoying his sea-furniture; "'T is stout and proper, and there's store of it: "Though I've the better notion, all agree, "Of fitting rooms up. Hang the carpenter, "Neat ship-shape fixings and contrivances "I would have brought my Jerome, frame and all!" And meantime you bring nothing: never mind You've proved your artist-nature: what you don't You might bring, so despise me, as I say.                       Now come, let's backward to the starting-place. See my way: we're two college friends, suppose. Prepare together for our voyage, then; Each note and check the other in his work, Here's mine, a bishop's outfit; criticize! What's wrong? why won't you be a bishop too? Why first, you don't believe, you don't and can't, (Not statedly, that is, and fixedly And absolutely and exclusively) In any revelation called divine. No dogmas nail your faith; and what remains But say so, like the honest man you are? First, therefore, overhaul theology! Nay, I too, not a fool, you please to think, Must find believing every whit as hard: And if I do not frankly say as much, The ugly consequence is clear enough. Now wait, my friend: well, I do not believe If you'll accept no faith that is not fixed, Absolute and exclusive, as you say. You're wrongI mean to prove it in due time. Meanwhile, I know where difficulties lie I could not, cannot solve, nor ever shall, So give up hope accordingly to solve                        (To you, and over the wine). Our dogmas then With both of us, though in unlike degree, Missing full credenceoverboard with them! I mean to meet you on your own premise: Good, there go mine in company with yours! And now what are we? unbelievers both, Calm and complete, determinately fixed To-day, to-morrow and for ever, pray? You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think! In no wise! all we've gained is, that belief, As unbelief before, shakes us by fits, Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's The gain? how can we guard our unbelief, Make it bear fruit to us?the problem here. Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides, And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again, The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly. There the old misgivings, crooked questions are This good God,what he could do, if he would,                       Would, if he couldthen must have done long since: If so, when, where and how? some way must be, Once feel about, and soon or late you hit Some sense, in which it might be, after all. Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?" That way Over the mountain, which who stands upon Is apt to doubt if it be meant for a road; While, if he views it from the waste itself, Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow, Not vague, mistakeable! what's a break or two Seen from the unbroken desert either side? And then (to bring in fresh philosophy) What if the breaks themselves should prove at last The most consummate of contrivances To train a man's eye, teach him what is faith? And so we stumble at truth's very test! All we have gained then by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt: We called the chess-board white,we call it black. "Well," you rejoin, "the end's no worse, at least; "We've reason for both colours on the board: "Why not confess then, where I drop the faith "And you the doubt, that I'm as right as you?"                       Because, friend, in the next place, this being so, And both things even,faith and unbelief Left to a man's choice,we'll proceed a step, Returning to our image, which I like. A man's choice, yesbut a cabin-passenger's The man made for the special life o' the world Do you forget him? I remember though! Consult our ship's conditions and you find One and but one choice suitable to all; The choice, that you unluckily prefer, Turning things topsy-turvythey or it Going to the ground. Belief or unbelief Bears upon life, determines its whole course, Begins at its beginning. See the world Such as it is,you made it not, nor I; I mean to take it as it is,and you, Not so you'll take it,though you get nought else. I know the special kind of life I like, What suits the most my idiosyncrasy, Brings out the best of me and bears me fruit In power, peace, pleasantness and length of days. I find that positive belief does this For me, and unbelief, no whit of this. For you, it does, however?that, we'll try! 'T is clear, I cannot lead my life, at least,                        Induce the world to let me peaceably, Without declaring at the outset, "Friends, "I absolutely and peremptorily "Believe!"I say, faith is my waking life: One sleeps, indeed, and dreams at intervals, We know, but waking's the main point with us And my provision's for life's waking part. Accordingly, I use heart, head and hand All day, I build, scheme, study, and make friends; And when night overtakes me, down I lie, Sleep, dream a little, and get done with it, The sooner the better, to begin afresh. What's midnight doubt before the dayspring's faith? You, the philosopher, that disbelieve, That recognize the night, give dreams their weight To be consistent you should keep your bed, Abstain from healthy acts that prove you man, For fear you drowse perhaps at unawares! And certainly at night you'll sleep and dream, Live through the day and bustle as you please. And so you live to sleep as I to wake, To unbelieve as I to still believe? Well, and the common sense o' the world calls you Bed-ridden,and its good things come to me. Its estimation, which is half the fight, That's the first-cabin comfort I secure:                       The next . . . but you perceive with half an eye! Come, come, it's best believing, if we may; You can't but own that! Next, concede again, If once we choose belief, on all accounts We can't be too decisive in our faith, Conclusive and exclusive in its terms, To suit the world which gives us the good things. In every man's career are certain points Whereon he dares not be indifferent; The world detects him clearly, if he dare, As baffled at the game, and losing life. He may care little or he may care much For riches, honour, pleasure, work, repose, Since various theories of life and life's Success are extant which might easily Comport with either estimate of these; And whoso chooses wealth or poverty, Labour or quiet, is not judged a fool Because his fellow would choose otherwise: We let him choose upon his own account So long as he's consistent with his choice. But certain points, left wholly to himself, When once a man has arbitrated on, We say he must succeed there or go hang.                      Thus, he should wed the woman he loves most Or needs most, whatsoe'er the love or need For he can't wed twice. Then, he must avouch, Or follow, at the least, sufficiently, The form of faith his conscience holds the best, Whate'er the process of conviction was: For nothing can compensate his mistake On such a point, the man himself being judge: He cannot wed twice, nor twice lose his soul. Well now, there's one great form of Christian faith I happened to be born inwhich to teach Was given me as I grew up, on all hands, As best and readiest means of living by; The same on examination being proved The most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise And absolute form of faith in the whole world Accordingly, most potent of all forms For working on the world. Observe, my friend! Such as you know me, I am free to say, In these hard latter days which hamper one, Myselfby no immoderate exercise Of intellect and learning, but the tact To let external forces work for me, Bid the street's stones be bread and they are bread;                      Bid Peter's creed, or rather, Hildebrand's, Exalt me o'er my fellows in the world And make my life an ease and joy and pride; It does so,which for me's a great point gained, Who have a soul and body that exact A comfortable care in many ways. There's power in me and will to dominate Which I must exercise, they hurt me else: In many ways I need mankind's respect, Obedience, and the love that's born of fear: While at the same time, there's a taste I have, A toy of soul, a titillating thing, Refuses to digest these dainties crude. The naked life is gross till clothed upon: I must take what men offer, with a grace As though I would not, could I help it, take! An uniform I wear though over-rich Something imposed on me, no choice of mine; No fancy-dress worn for pure fancy's sake And despicable therefore! now folk kneel And kiss my handof course the Church's hand. Thus I am made, thus life is best for me, And thus that it should be I have procured; And thus it could not be another way, I venture to imagine.                       You'll reply, So far my choice, no doubt, is a success; But were I made of better elements, With nobler instincts, purer tastes, like you, I hardly would account the thing success Though it did all for me I say. But, friend, We speak of what is; not of what might be, And how't were better if't were otherwise. I am the man you see here plain enough: Grant I'm a beast, why, beasts must lead beasts' lives! Suppose I own at once to tail and claws; The tailless man exceeds me: but being tailed I'll lash out lion fashion, and leave apes To dock their stump and dress their haunches up. My business is not to remake myself, But make the absolute best of what God made. Orour first similethough you prove me doomed To a viler berth still, to the steerage-hole, The sheep-pen or the pig-stye, I should strive To make what use of each were possible; And as this cabin gets upholstery, That hutch should rustle with sufficient straw. But, friend, I don't acknowledge quite so fast I fail of all your manhood's lofty tastes                      Enumerated so complacently, On the mere ground that you forsooth can find In this particular life I choose to lead No fit provision for them. Can you not? Say you, my fault is I address myself To grosser estimators than should judge? And that's no way of holding up the soul, Which, nobler, needs men's praise perhaps, yet knows One wise man's verdict outweighs all the fools' Would like the two, but, forced to choose, takes that. I pine among my million imbeciles (You think) aware some dozen men of sense Eye me and know me, whether I believe In the last winking Virgin, as I vow, And am a fool, or disbelieve in her And am a knave,approve in neither case, Withhold their voices though I look their way: Like Verdi when, at his worst opera's end (The thing they gave at Florence,what's its name?) While the mad houseful's plaudits near out-bang His orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones, He looks through all the roaring and the wreaths Where sits Rossini patient in his stall. Nay, friend, I meet you with an answer here That even your prime men who appraise their kind                      Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel, See more in a truth than the truth's simple self, Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street Sixty the minute; what's to note in that? You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack; Him you must watchhe's sure to fall, yet stands! Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demirep That loves and saves her soul in new French books We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway: one step aside, They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line Before your sages,just the men to shrink From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad You offer their refinement. Fool or knave? Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave When there's a thousand diamond weights between? So, I enlist them. Your picked twelve, you'll find, Profess themselves indignant, scandalized At thus being held unable to explain How a superior man who disbelieves May not believe as well: that's Schelling's way! It's through my coming in the tail of time, Nicking the minute with a happy tact. Had I been born three hundred years ago                      They'd say, "What's strange? Blougram of course believes;" And, seventy years since, "disbelieves of course." But now, "He may believe; and yet, and yet "How can he?" All eyes turn with interest. Whereas, step off the line on either side You, for example, clever to a fault, The rough and ready man who write apace, Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less You disbelieve! Who wonders and who cares? Lord So-and-sohis coat bedropped with wax, All Peter's chains about his waist, his back Brave with the needlework of Noodledom Believes! Again, who wonders and who cares? But I, the man of sense and learning too, The able to think yet act, the this, the that, I, to believe at this late time of day! Enough; you see, I need not fear contempt. Except it's yours! Admire me as these may, You don't. But whom at least do you admire? Present your own perfection, your ideal, Your pattern man for a minuteoh, make haste Is it Napoleon you would have us grow? Concede the means; allow his head and hand, (A large concession, clever as you are)                        Good! In our common primal element Of unbelief (we can't believe, you know We're still at that admission, recollect!) Where do you findapart from, towering o'er The secondary temporary aims Which satisfy the gross taste you despise Where do you find his star?his crazy trust God knows through what or in what? it's alive And shines and leads him, and that's all we want. Have we aught in our sober night shall point Such ends as his were, and direct the means Of working out our purpose straight as his, Nor bring a moment's trouble on success With after-care to justify the same? Be a Napoleon, and yet disbelieve Why, the man's mad, friend, take his light away! What's the vague good o' the world, for which you dare With comfort to yourself blow millions up? We neither of us see it! we do see The blown-up millionsspatter of their brains And writhing of their bowels and so forth, In that bewildering entanglement Of horrible eventualities Past calculation to the end of time! Can I mistake for some clear word of God (Which were my ample warrant for it all)                        His puff of hazy instinct, idle talk, "The State, that's I," quack-nonsense about crowns, And (when one beats the man to his last hold) A vague idea of setting things to rights, Policing people efficaciously, More to their profit, most of all to his own; The whole to end that dismallest of ends By an Austrian marriage, cant to us the Church, And resurrection of the old rgime ? Would I, who hope to live a dozen years, Fight Austerlitz for reasons such and such? No: for, concede me but the merest chance Doubt may be wrongthere's judgment, life to come! With just that chance, I dare not. Doubt proves right? This present life is all?you offer me Its dozen noisy years, without a chance That wedding an archduchess, wearing lace, And getting called by divers new-coined names, Will drive off ugly thoughts and let me dine, Sleep, read and chat in quiet as I like! Therefore I will not. Take another case; Fit up the cabin yet another way. What say you to the poets? shall we write Hamlet, Othellomake the world our own,                        Without a risk to run of either sort? I can'tto put the strongest reason first. "But try," you urge, "the trying shall suffice; "The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: "Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!" Spare my self-knowledgethere's no fooling me! If I prefer remaining my poor self, I say so not in self-dispraise but praise. If I'm a Shakespeare, let the well alone; Why should I try to be what now I am? If I'm no Shakespeare, as too probable, His power and consciousness and self-delight And all we want in common, shall I find Trying for ever? while on points of taste Wherewith, to speak it humbly, he and I Are dowered alikeI'll ask you, I or he, Which in our two lives realizes most? Much, he imaginedsomewhat, I possess. He had the imagination; stick to that! Let him say, "In the face of my soul's works "Your world is worthless and I touch it not "Lest I should wrong them"I'll withdraw my plea. But does he say so? look upon his life! Himself, who only can, gives judgment there. He leaves his towers and gorgeous palaces To build the trimmest house in Stratford town;                        Saves money, spends it, owns the worth of things, Giulio Romano's pictures, Dowland's lute; Enjoys a show, respects the puppets, too, And none more, had he seen its entry once, Than "Pandulph, of fair Milan cardinal." Why then should I who play that personage, The very Pandulph Shakespeare's fancy made, Be told that had the poet chanced to start From where I stand now (some degree like mine Being just the goal he ran his race to reach) He would have run the whole race back, forsooth, And left being Pandulph, to begin write plays? Ah, the earth's best can be but the earth's best! Did Shakespeare live, he could but sit at home And get himself in dreams the Vatican, Greek busts, Venetian paintings, Roman walls, And English books, none equal to his own, Which I read, bound in gold (he never did). Terni's fall, Naples' bay and Gothard's top Eh, friend? I could not fancy one of these; But, as I pour this claret, there they are: I've gained themcrossed St. Gothard last July With ten mules to the carriage and a bed Slung inside; is my hap the worse for that? We want the same things, Shakespeare and myself, And what I want, I have: he, gifted more,                        Could fancy he too had them when he liked, But not so thoroughly that, if fate allowed, He would not have them also in my sense. We play one game; I send the ball aloft No less adroitly that of fifty strokes Scarce five go o'er the wall so wide and high Which sends them back to me: I wish and get He struck balls higher and with better skill, But at a poor fence level with his head, And hithis Stratford house, a coat of arms, Successful dealings in his grain and wool, While I receive heaven's incense in my nose And style myself the cousin of Queen Bess. Ask him, if this life's all, who wins the game? Believeand our whole argument breaks up. Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat; Only, we can't command it; fire and life Are all, dead matter's nothing, we agree: And be it a mad dream or God's very breath, The fact's the same,belief's fire, once in us, Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself: We penetrate our life with such a glow As fire lends wood and ironthis turns steel, That burns to ashall's one, fire proves its power For good or ill, since men call flare success.                        But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn. Light one in me, I'll find it food enough! Why, to be Lutherthat's a life to lead, Incomparably better than my own. He comes, reclaims God's earth for God, he says, Sets up God's rule again by simple means, Re-opens a shut book, and all is done. He flared out in the flaring of mankind; Such Luther's luck was: how shall such be mine? If he succeeded, nothing's left to do: And if he did not altogetherwell, Strauss is the next advance. All Strauss should be I might be also. But to what result? He looks upon no future: Luther did. What can I gain on the denying side? Ice makes no conflagration. State the facts, Read the text right, emancipate the world The emancipated world enjoys itself With scarce a thank-you: Blougram told it first It could not owe a farthing,not to him More than Saint Paul! 't would press its pay, you think? Then add there's still that plaguy hundredth chance Strauss may be wrong. And so a risk is run For what gain? not for Luther's, who secured A real heaven in his heart throughout his life, Supposing death a little altered things.                       "Ay, but since really you lack faith," you cry, "You run the same risk really on all sides, "In cool indifference as bold unbelief. "As well be Strauss as swing 'twixt Paul and him. "It's not worth having, such imperfect faith, "No more available to do faith's work "Than unbelief like mine. Whole faith, or none!" Softly, my friend! I must dispute that point Once own the use of faith, I'll find you faith. We're back on Christian ground. You call for faith: I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, If faith o'ercomes doubt. How I know it does? By life and man's free will, God gave for that! To mould life as we choose it, shows our choice: That's our one act, the previous work's his own. You criticize the soul? it reared this tree This broad life and whatever fruit it bears! What matter though I doubt at every pore, Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my fingers' ends, Doubts in the trivial work of every day, Doubts at the very bases of my soul In the grand moments when she probes herself If finally I have a life to show, The thing I did, brought out in evidence                        Against the thing done to me underground By hell and all its brood, for aught I know? I say, whence sprang this? shows it faith or doubt? All's doubt in me; where's break of faith in this? It is the idea, the feeling and the love, God means mankind should strive for and show forth Whatever be the process to that end, And not historic knowledge, logic sound, And metaphysical acumen, sure! "What think ye of Christ," friend? when all's done and said, Like you this Christianity or not? It may be false, but will you wish it true? Has it your vote to be so if it can? Trust you an instinct silenced long ago That will break silence and enjoin you love What mortified philosophy is hoarse, And all in vain, with bidding you despise? If you desire faiththen you've faith enough: What else seeks Godnay, what else seek ourselves? You form a notion of me, we'll suppose, On hearsay; it's a favourable one: "But still" (you add), "there was no such good man, "Because of contradiction in the facts. "One proves, for instance, he was born in Rome, "This Blougram; yet throughout the tales of him                      "I see he figures as an Englishman." Well, the two things are reconcileable. But would I rather you discovered that, Subjoining"Still, what matter though they be? "Blougram concerns me nought, born here or there." Pure faith indeedyou know not what you ask! Naked belief in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much The sense of conscious creatures to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth: I say it's meant to hide him all it can, And that's what all the blessed evil's for. Its use in Time is to environ us, Our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough Against that sight till we can bear its stress. Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain And lidless eye and disemprisoned heart Less certainly would wither up at once Than mind, confronted with the truth of him. But time and earth case-harden us to live; The feeblest sense is trusted most; the child Feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place, Plays on and grows to be a man like us.                      With me, faith means perpetual unbelief Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe. Or, if that's too ambitious,here's my box I need the excitation of a pinch Threatening the torpor of the inside-nose Nigh on the imminent sneeze that never comes. "Leave it in peace" advise the simple folk: Make it aware of peace by itching-fits, Say Ilet doubt occasion still more faith! You'll say, once all believed, man, woman, child, In that dear middle-age these noodles praise. How you'd exult if I could put you back Six hundred years, blot out cosmogony, Geology, ethnology, what not (Greek endings, each the little passing-bell That signifies some faith's about to die), And set you square with Genesis again, When such a traveller told you his last news, He saw the ark a-top of Ararat But did not climb there since 't was getting dusk And robber-bands infest the mountain's foot! How should you feel, I ask, in such an age, How act? As other people felt and did; With soul more blank than this decanter's knob,                 Believeand yet lie, kill, rob, fornicate Full in belief's face, like the beast you'd be! No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feetboth tug He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! Never leave growing till the life to come! Here, we've got callous to the Virgin's winks That used to puzzle people wholesomely: Men have outgrown the shame of being fools. What are the laws of nature, not to bend If the Church bid them?brother Newman asks. Up with the Immaculate Conception, then On to the rack with faith!is my advice. Will not that hurry us upon our knees, Knocking our breasts, "It can't beyet it shall! "Who am I, the worm, to argue with my Pope? "Low things confound the high things!" and so forth. That's better than acquitting God with grace As some folk do. He's triedno case is proved, Philosophy is lenienthe may go! You'll say, the old system's not so obsolete But men believe still: ay, but who and where?                      King Bomba's lazzaroni foster yet The sacred flame, so Antonelli writes; But even of these, what ragamuffin-saint Believes God watches him continually, As he believes in fire that it will burn, Or rain that it will drench him? Break fire's law, Sin against rain, although the penalty Be just a singe or soaking? "No," he smiles; "Those laws are laws that can enforce themselves." The sum of all isyes, my doubt is great, My faith's still greater, then my faith's enough. I have read much, thought much, experienced much, Yet would die rather than avow my fear The Naples' liquefaction may be false, When set to happen by the palace-clock According to the clouds or dinner-time. I hear you recommend, I might at least Eliminate, decrassify my faith Since I adopt it; keeping what I must And leaving what I cansuch points as this. I won'tthat is, I can't throw one away. Supposing there's no truth in what I hold About the need of trial to man's faith, Still, when you bid me purify the same, To such a process I discern no end.                  Clearing off one excrescence to see two, There's ever a next in size, now grown as big, That meets the knife: I cut and cut again! First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? Experimentalize on sacred things! I trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain To stop betimes: they all get drunk alike. The first step, I am master not to take. You'd find the cutting-process to your taste As much as leaving growths of lies unpruned, Nor see more danger in it,you retort. Your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise When we consider that the steadfast hold On the extreme end of the chain of faith Gives all the advantage, makes the difference With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule: We are their lords, or they are free of us, Just as we tighten or relax our hold. So, others matters equal, we'll revert To the first problemwhich, if solved my way And thrown into the balance, turns the scale How we may lead a comfortable life, How suit our luggage to the cabin's size.                     Of course you are remarking all this time How narrowly and grossly I view life, Respect the creature-comforts, care to rule The masses, and regard complacently "The cabin," in our old phrase. Well, I do. I act for, talk for, live for this world now, As this world prizes action, life and talk: No prejudice to what next world may prove, Whose new laws and requirements, my best pledge To observe then, is that I observe these now, Shall do hereafter what I do meanwhile. Let us concede (gratuitously though) Next life relieves the soul of body, yields Pure spiritual enjoyment: well, my friend, Why lose this life i' the meantime, since its use May be to make the next life more intense? Do you know, I have often had a dream (Work it up in your next month's article) Of man's poor spirit in its progress, still Losing true life for ever and a day Through ever trying to be and ever being In the evolution of successive spheres Before its actual sphere and place of life, Halfway into the next, which having reached, It shoots with corresponding foolery                      Halfway into the next still, on and off! As when a traveller, bound from North to South, Scouts fur in Russia: what's its use in France? In France spurns flannel: where's its need in Spain? In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers! Linen goes next, and last the skin itself, A superfluity at Timbuctoo. When, through his journey, was the fool at ease? I'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world, I take and like its way of life; I think My brothers, who administer the means, Live better for my comfortthat's good too; And God, if he pronounce upon such life, Approves my service, which is better still. If he keep silence,why, for you or me Or that brute beast pulled-up in to-day's "Times," What odds is't, save to ourselves, what life we lead? You meet me at this issue: you declare, All special-pleading done withtruth is truth, And justifies itself by undreamed ways. You don't fear but it's better, if we doubt, To say so, act up to our truth perceived However feebly. Do then,act away! 'T is there I'm on the watch for you. How one acts Is, both of us agree, our chief concern:                      And how you'll act is what I fain would see If, like the candid person you appear, You dare to make the most of your life's scheme As I of mine, live up to its full law Since there's no higher law that counterchecks. Put natural religion to the test You've just demolished the revealed withquick, Down to the root of all that checks your will, All prohibition to lie, kill and thieve, Or even to be an atheistic priest! Suppose a pricking to incontinence Philosophers deduce you chastity Or shame, from just the fact that at the first Whoso embraced a woman in the field, Threw club down and forewent his brains beside, So, stood a ready victim in the reach Of any brother savage, club in hand; Hence saw the use of going out of sight In wood or cave to prosecute his loves: I read this in a French book t' other day. Does law so analysed coerce you much? Oh, men spin clouds of fuzz where matters end, But you who reach where the first thread begins, You'll soon cut that!which means you can, but won't, Through certain instincts, blind, unreasoned-out,                      You dare not set aside, you can't tell why, But there they are, and so you let them rule. Then, friend, you seem as much a slave as I, A liar, conscious coward and hypocrite, Without the good the slave expects to get, In case he has a master after all! You own your instincts? why, what else do I, Who want, am made for, and must have a God Ere I can be aught, do aught?no mere name Want, but the true thing with what proves its truth, To wit, a relation from that thing to me, Touching from head to footwhich touch I feel, And with it take the rest, this life of ours! I live my life here; yours you dare not live. Not as I state it, who (you please subjoin) Disfigure such a life and call it names, While, to your mind, remains another way For simple men: knowledge and power have rights, But ignorance and weakness have rights too. There needs no crucial effort to find truth If here or there or anywhere about: We ought to turn each side, try hard and see, And if we can't, be glad we've earned at least The right, by one laborious proof the more, To graze in peace earth's pleasant pasturage.                      Men are not angels, neither are they brutes: Something we may see, all we cannot see. What need of lying? I say, I see all, And swear to each detail the most minute In what I think a Pan's faceyou, mere cloud: I swear I hear him speak and see him wink, For fear, if once I drop the emphasis, Mankind may doubt there's any cloud at all. You take the simple lifeready to see, Willing to see (for no cloud's worth a face) And leaving quiet what no strength can move, And which, who bids you move? who has the right? I bid you; but you are God's sheep, not mine: " Pastor est tui Dominus ." You find In this the pleasant pasture of our life Much you may eat without the least offence, Much you don't eat because your maw objects, Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock Open great eyes at you and even butt, And thereupon you like your mates so well You cannot please yourself, offending them; Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep, You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears Restrain you, real checks since you find them so; Sometimes you please yourself and nothing checks:                        And thus you graze through life with not one lie, And like it best. But do you, in truth's name? If so, you beatwhich means you are not I Who needs must make earth mine and feed my fill Not simply unbutted at, unbickered with, But motioned to the velvet of the sward By those obsequious wethers' very selves. Look at me, sir; my age is double yours: At yours, I knew beforehand, so enjoyed, What now I should beas, permit the word, I pretty well imagine your whole range And stretch of tether twenty years to come. We both have minds and bodies much alike: In truth's name, don't you want my bishopric, My daily bread, my influence and my state? You're young. I'm old; you must be old one day; Will you find then, as I do hour by hour, Women their lovers kneel to, who cut curls From your fat lap-dog's ear to grace a brooch Dukes, who petition just to kiss your ring With much beside you know or may conceive? Suppose we die to-night: well, here am I, Such were my gains, life bore this fruit to me, While writing all the same my articles                      On music, poetry, the fictile vase Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon's Greek. But youthe highest honour in your life, The thing you'll crown yourself with, all your days, Isdining here and drinking this last glass I pour you out in sign of amity Before we part for ever. Of your power And social influence, worldly worth in short, Judge what's my estimation by the fact, I do not condescend to enjoin, beseech, Hint secrecy on one of all these words! You're shrewd and know that should you publish one The world would brand the liemy enemies first, Who'd sneer"the bishop's an arch-hypocrite "And knave perhaps, but not so frank a fool." Whereas I should not dare for both my ears Breathe one such syllable, smile one such smile, Before the chaplain who reflects myself My shade's so much more potent than your flesh. What's your reward, self-abnegating friend? Stood you confessed of those exceptional And privileged great natures that dwarf mine A zealot with a mad ideal in reach, A poet just about to print his ode, A statesman with a scheme to stop this war, An artist whose religion is his art      ~ Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology ,

   31 Integral Yoga
   14 Christianity
   13 Occultism
   7 Philosophy
   4 Psychology
   3 Poetry
   3 Baha i Faith
   2 Islam
   1 Yoga
   1 Hinduism


   20 Sri Aurobindo
   9 The Mother
   9 Saint Augustine of Hippo
   9 James George Frazer
   8 Satprem
   6 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   4 Plotinus
   3 Plato
   3 Carl Jung
   3 Baha u llah
   2 Sri Ramakrishna
   2 Muhammad
   2 A B Purani


   9 The Golden Bough
   8 City of God
   4 Record of Yoga
   3 Letters On Yoga IV
   3 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   2 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   2 The Book of Certitude
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Quran
   2 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   2 Agenda Vol 06
   2 Agenda Vol 04

01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    So first the individual and then the commune is not the natural nor the ideal principle. On the other hand, first the commune and then the individual would appear to be an equally defective principle. For first a commune means an organisation, its laws and rules and regulations, its injunctions and Prohibitions; all which signifies or comes to signify that every individual is not free to enter its fold and that whoever enters must know how to dovetail himself therein and thus crush down the very life-power whose enhancement and efflorescence is sought. First a commune means necessarily a creed, a dogma, a set form of being and living indelibly marked out from beforehand. The individual has there no choice of finding and developing the particular creed or dogma or mode of being and living, from out of his own self, along his particular line of natural growth; all that is imposed upon him and he has to accept and make it his own by trial and effort and self-torture. Even if the commune be a contractual association, the members having joined together in a common cause to a common end, by voluntarily sacrificing a portion of their personal choice and freedom, even then it is not the ideal thing; the collective soul will be diminished in exact proportion as each individual soul has had to be diminished, be that voluntary or otherwise. That commune is plenary and entire which ensures plenitude and entirety to each of its individuals.    Now how to escape the dilemma? Only if we take the commune and the individual togetheren bloc, as has already been suggested. This means that the commune should be at the beginning a subtle and supple thing, without form and even without name, it should be no more than the circumambient aura the sukshma deha that plays around a group of individuals who meet and unite and move together by a secret affinity, along a common path towards a common goal. As each individual develops and defines himself, the commune also takes a more and more concrete shape; and when at the last stage the individual rises to the full height of his godhead, takes possession of his integral divinity, the commune also establishes its solid empire, vivid and vibrant in form and name.

0 1960-10-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen    Sometime later (he doesnt know how long, for until he returned he had no sense of time), he woke up in a rather dark, low-roofed house way out in the country; there were five persons now, not four. They were busy eating, so he was careful not to budge. Mainly they were drinking (they have Prohibition there). Four of them were already dead drunk. So he got up to have a look. The fifth one, whom he hadnt seen before (he must have been the chief), was not yet totally drunk; when he saw the boy stirring, he let out a fearful growlso the poor boy threw himself flat in the corner and lay stillhe waited. After awhile, the fifth one (after downing another bottle) was also dead drunk. So now that he saw them all fast asleep, he got up very cautiously and he said he ran for an hour and a half! A boy pummelled as he had been, who hadnt eaten for four days! I think thats a miracle.    After running for an hour and a half, he found himself back at the Poona station, he doesnt know how. He caught a train back to Bombay, scarcely knowing how he managed it.

0 1963-01-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Ive had this experience even just recently. All that comes to me from people who have dedicated their lives to spiritual life, people who do a yoga in the traditional way, who are very solemn, who see adversaries everywhere, obstacles everywhere, taboos everywhere, Prohibitions everywhere, oh, how they complicate life and how far they are from the Divine! I saw this the other day with someone you know. With that kind of people, you should not do this, should not do that, should not At such and such time you must not do this, on such and such day you must not do that; you should not eat this, you should not And then, for heavens sake, dont you go mixing your daily life with your sacred life!thats how you dig an abyss.    Its the exact, exact opposite of what I feel now: no matter what happens something wrong in the body, something wrong with people, something wrong in circumstancesinstantly, the first movement: O my sweet Lord, my Beloved! And I laugh! And then all is well. I did this the other day (its spontaneous and instantaneous, it isnt thought out or willed or plannednone of itit just happens), it happened the other day (I dont recall the details but it was over a circumstance that hardly seemed sacred): I saw myself, and I started laughing. I said, But look! I dont need to be serious, I dont need to be solemn!   --    But especially all the Prohibitions. For instance, let me quote you a statement from X which I heard from a third person: I will do a special puja to help money come. I will prepare a special yantram1 to bring money. But FOR GODS SAKE dont say anything [to Mother], dont do anything or give anything before January 14, because until January 14, a certain planet is in opposition to a certain other planet (Mother laughs), so things follow a downward trend and wont be successful. But afterwards, that particular planet will be ascending and everything will be successful! (Mother laughs) Something in me said spontaneously (something, well, someone), spontaneously and immediately, But why? I can always hear! And I laughed. So they thought I was making fun of him I dont make fun: I laugh, its not the same!    So, mon petit, thats all.

0 1963-02-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    But I must say it isnt confined to the Ashram: its the same all over the worldespecially in India the government has gone completely crazy. They bombard people with papers and forms and regulations and Prohibitions.    A third of my letters are either censored or lost.

0 1965-06-14, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    So I put as first condition (I wrote it in English): the sole aim of life is to dedicate oneself to the divine realization (I didnt put it in these terms, but thats the idea). You must first (you may deceive yourself, but that doesnt make any difference), first be convinced that this is what you want and you want this aloneprimo. Then Nolini told me that the second condition should be that my absolute authority had to be recognized. I said, Not like that!, we should put that Sri Aurobindos absolute authority is recognized (we can add [laughing], represented by me, because he cannot speak, of course, except to meto me he speaks very clearly, but others dont hear!). Then there are many other things, I dont remember, and finally a last paragraph that goes like this (Mother looks for a note). Previously, I remember, Sri Aurobindo had also put together a little paper to give people, but its outdated (it was about not quarreling with the police! And what else, I dont rememberits outdated). But I didnt want to put Prohibitions in, because Prohibitions first of all, its an encouragement to revolt, always, and then there is a good proportion of characters who, when they are forbidden to do something, immediately feel an urge to do itthey might not even have thought of it otherwise, but they just have to be told about it to Ah, but I do as I like. All right.    (Mother starts reading) To those I am making a distinction: there are people who come here and want to dedicate themselves to divine life, but they come to do work and they will work (they wont do an intensive yoga because not one in fifty is capable of doing it, but they are capable of dedicating their life and of working and doing good work disinterestedly, as a service to the Divine thats very good), but in particular, To those who want to practice the integral yoga, it is strongly advised to abstain from three things. So, the three things ([laughing] you put your fingers in your ears): sexual intercourse (it comes third) and drinking alcohol and [whispering] smoking.

0 1965-11-27, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    But I clearly see that when the work is done as I am made to do it, it becomes that way very spontaneously. For instance, one of the very concrete things, which shows the problem clearly: humanity has the sex impulse quite naturally, spontaneously and, I may say, legitimately. This impulse will naturally and spontaneously disappear along with animality (a lot of other things will disappear, such as for instance the need to eat, perhaps also the need to sleep the way we do), but the most conscious impulse in a higher humanity, and which has remained as a source of bliss is a big word, but of joy, of delight, is certainly the sexual activity, which will have absolutely no more reason to exist in the functions of nature when the need to create in that way no longer exists. Therefore the capacity to come into contact with the joy in life will go up one rung or will orient itself differently. But what the spiritual aspirants of old had attempted on principlesexual negationis an absurd thing, because it must exist only in those who have gone beyond that stage and no longer have any animality in them. And it must fall off naturally, effortlessly, without struggle, just like that. Making it a focus of conflict, struggle and effort is ridiculous. To be sure, my experience with the Ashram has absolutely proved that to me, because I have seen all the stages and that all the ideas and Prohibitions are absolutely useless, that its only when the consciousness stops being human that it falls off quite naturally. There is a transition there that may be somewhat difficult because transitional beings are always in a precarious balance, but inside oneself there is a sort of flame or need thanks to which the transition isnt painfulits not a painful effort, its something that can be done with a smile. But to want to impose that on those who arent ready for that transition is absurd. I have been much reproached for encouraging certain people to marry; there are lots of these children to whom I say, Get married, get married! I am told, What! You encourage them?its common sense.    Its common sense. They are human, but let them not pretend they arent.

0 1966-03-19, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    It is true that up till now, the government has multiplied blunders of such stupidity! It seems a child with common sense wouldnt have committed such blunders. And naturally, even in those who have no bad will or vengeful feelings, it creates an unpleasant tension: you cant do anything anymore, youre bound on all sides! Whatever you do, there are oppositions and Prohibitions everywhere. So people no longer know what to do, nobody can do anything anymore.    They have ruined the country, starved it.

03.08 - The Spiritual Outlook, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    When the Divine acts, it acts always in and through this transcendental and innermost truth of things. When it helps the seeker, it touches and inspires the secret soul in himhis truthnot like the human teacher or reformer who addresses himself to the outer personality, to laws and codes, Prohibitions and injunctions, reward and punishment, for the education and instruction of his pupil. Indeed, the Divine chastises also in the same way. The Asura or the anti-divine he does not kill with one blow nor even with many blows of his thunderbolt or burn away with his red wrath. The image of Zeus or Jehovah is a human figuration: it depicts the human way of dealing with one's enemies. The Divine deals with the undivine in the divine way, for the undivine too is not something outside the Divine. The Asura also has; his truth, his truth in the Divine, only it has been degraded and deformed under circumstances. The Divine simply disengages, picks up that core of truth and takes it away so that it can no longer be appropriated and deformed by the Asura who now losing the secret support of his truth automatically crumbles to pieces as mere husk and chaff. If there is something more than the merely human in the image of Durga, the Goddess transfixing her lance right into the heart of the Asura may be taken as indicative of this occult truth.    There is then this singular and utter harmony in the divine consciousness resolving all contraries and incompatibles. Neha nnsti kicana, there is no division or disparity here. Established in this consciousness, the spiritual man naturally and inevitably finds that he is in all and all are in him and that he is all and all are he, for all and he are indivisibly that single (yet multiple) reality. The brotherhood of man is only a derivative from the more fundamental truth of the universal selfhood of man.

03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Over against the personality of Hamlet stands another which represents false height, the wrong perfection, the counterfeit ideal. Polonius is humanity arrested in its path of straight development and deviated into a cut-de-sac of self-conceit and surface urbanity, apparent cleverness and success and pretentious and copy-book morality. When one has outgrown the barbarian, one runs the risk of becoming a snob or philistine. It is a side table-land, as it were, on mid-heights, the standard perhaps of a commoner humanity, but which the younger ideal has to transcend or avoid or even to destroy, so that it may find itself and live its own life. To the philistine too the mere biological man is a taboo, but he seeks to confine human nature into a scheme of codes and maxims and lifeless injunctions and Prohibitions. He is also the man of Reason but without the higher inflatus, the living and creative Something More the poetry, the vision, the dream that would transfigure the merely pragmatic, practical, worldly wise the bourgeoisinto the princely aristocratic idealist, elevate the drab terre terre To-day into the glory of a soaring To-morrow.    What is the crisis that confronts the ascending visionary soul? What is the obstacle that the Idealist has to face, the danger zone that he has to traverse in order to arrive at- the realisation of his ideal?

08.20 - Are Not The Ascetic Means Helpful At Times?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Here the thing is somewhat different. The principle of education or training followed here is that of liberty. Life is organised on the basis of maximum freedom; in other words, rules and regulations, injunctions and Prohibitions are reduced to a minimum. If you compare our way with that followed by parents in the world with their constant admonitions: don't do this, that is forbidden, must do this but not that etc., etc., you will find the difference. At the school and the college, everywhere, there are rules infinitely more strict than are found here. So, because no absolute conditions are imposed on you for your progress, you do it when it pleases you and you don't do when it does not please you; you take things quite easily.    Of course there are some who do make the effort spontaneously. And that from the spiritual point of view has an infinitely greater value. You make the progress, because you feel within you the need to do so, because it is an impulse that wells up from your depths, not because you are driven by a compel ling force outside. What you do spontaneously and sincerely of your own accord is something part and grain of yourself. You do a thing not because if you do it you will be rewarded and if you do not do it you will be punished. It might happen, however, sometimes that something comes to you or into you and gives you the impression that your effort is appreciated, but the effort is not due to that. Indeed, things are arranged in such a way here that the satisfaction of having done and done well is the best reward one has and one punishes oneself thoroughly by doing badly or not doing; no other punishment can be more real or more concrete. All this is immensely significant and valuable from the standpoint of spiritual growth, much more than things produced by external regulation and pressure.

1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i   Hair doth not invalidate your prayer, nor aught from which the spirit hath departed, such as bones and the like. Ye are free to wear the fur of the sable as ye would that of the beaver, the squirrel, and other animals; the Prohibition of its use hath stemmed, not from the Qur'an, but from the misconceptions of the divines. He, verily, is the All-Glorious, the All-Knowing.   10   --   In the Bayan it had been forbidden you to ask Us questions. The Lord hath now relieved you of this Prohibition, that ye may be free to ask what you need to ask, but not such idle questions as those on which the men of former times were wont to dwell. Fear God, and be ye of the righteous! Ask ye that which shall be of profit to you in the Cause of God and His dominion, for the portals of His tender compassion have been opened before all who dwell in heaven and on earth.   127

1.00 - PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry   So long I make no Prohibition.   While Man's desires and aspirations stir,

1.016 - The Bee, #Quran, #unset, #Zen   35. The idolaters say, “Had God willed, we would not have worshiped anything besides Him, neither us, nor our ancestors, nor would we have prohibited anything besides His Prohibitions.” Those before them did likewise. Are the messengers responsible for anything but clear communication?   36. To every community We sent a messenger: “Worship God, and avoid idolatry.” Some of them God guided, while others deserved misguidance. So travel through the earth, and see what the fate of the deniers was.

1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   Prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to   leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the negative   --   or important than the Prohibitions to eat certain foods, and of such   Prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law of   similarity and are accordingly examples of negative magic. Just as   --   qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of Prohibitions or   rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   Prohibition, description of what is forbidden: Thou shalt not. By contrast, Christs message is more in the   manner of exhortation, description of active good: Thou shalt....557 This transformation is predicated upon   --   conscience from rule of law to rule of spirit from Prohibition to exhortation. To love God this means   to listen to the voice of truth,571 and to act in accordance with its messages; to love thy neighbour, as thy

1.066 - Prohibition, #Quran, #unset, #Zen   object:1.066 - Prohibition   class:chapter

1.08 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism   M. (to himself): "How strange! This young man has developed the state of a paramahamsa. That is what the Master says now and then. Is there still a possibility of his falling into danger in spite of his high spiritual state? What an austere rule is laid down for a sdhu! He may slip from his ideal by associating intimately with women. How can an ordinary man expect to attain liberation unless such a high ideal is set by holy men? The woman in question is very devout; but still there is danger. Now I understand why Chaitanya punished his disciple, the younger Haridas, so severely. In spite of his teacher's Prohibition, Haridas conversed with a widow devotee. But he was a sannyasi.   Therefore Chaitanya banished him. What a severe punishment! How hard is the rule for one who has accepted the life of renunciation! Again, what love the Master cherishes for this devotee! He is warning him even now, lest he should run into danger in the future."

1.12 - The Sociology of Superman, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga   We are born in a lead casing. It surrounds us completely. It is airtight and invisible, but it is there all the same, covering our least gestures and reactions. We are born ready-made, as it were, but the making is not of our own, neither in the best nor in the worst. There are millions of sensations, which are not yet thoughts, but like seeds of desire or repulsion, odors of fear, odors of anguish, like a subtle fungus lining our caves: layers upon layers of Prohibitions and taboos, and a few rare permissions thrown in like an escape of the same dark onrush in our tunnels. And, in the middle of all that, a bewildered and lost little look who will soon be taught life, good and evil, geometry and the Tables of the Law. A little look getting more and more veiled, and definitely lost after he has been made to understand everything. For the obvious and natural assumption is that a child understands nothing and has to be taught how to live. But it could be that a child understands very well, even if that does not agree with our constructs, and that we merely teach him to bury his knowledge and replace it with a ready-made science, which buries him for good. Then we spend thirty years of our life undoing what they have done, unless we are a particularly successful subject, that is, definitively immured, satisfied, polite and holding degrees. Hence, a great part of the work involves not doing but undoing that spell. We will be told that this struggle is fruitful, enriching, that it develops our muscles and personality that is wrong. It hardens us, develops fighting muscles in us and may well drive us into an against as noxious as the for. Moreover, it does not develop a personality, but a mask, for the true person is there, totally there, artless and wide open, in the eyes of a newborn child we only add the misery of struggle. We believe utterly, intensely and blindly in the power of suffering; it has been the subconscious mark of our entire Western civilization for the last two thousand years. Perhaps it was necessary, given the denseness of our substance. But the law of suffering is a law of Falsehood what is true smiles, that's all. Suffering is a sign of falsehood, the product of falsehood; they go hand and hand. To believe that suffering is enriching is to believe that cancer is a boon from the gods, although cancer, too, can help us break the shell of falsehood. Like all virtues, this negative virtue leaves a permanent shadow on us; and even the unobscured sun is still blemished by it. The blows, truly and necessarily, leave their mark; they produce liberated beings with scorched hearts who remember having suffered. That memory is yet another veil over the artless look. The law of the gods is a sunlit one. And perhaps the whole work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother is to have brought the world the possibility of a sunlit path on which suffering, pain and disaster are no longer necessary in order to progress.   The apprentice superman does not believe in suffering. He believes in enrichment through joy; he believes in Harmony. He does not believe in education; he believes in the power of truth in the heart of all things and all beings he only helps that truth to grow with as little interference as possible. He trusts in the powers of that truth. He knows that man always moves toward his goal, inexorably, despite everything he is told or taught he only tries to suppress that despite. He simply waters that little sapling of truth and then again, with some caution, for some saplings prefer a sandy and rocky soil. But, at least, in that City or rather, laboratory of the future the child will be born in less stifling conditions. He will not be brainwashed, met at every street corner by screaming posters, corrupted by television or poisoned by vulgar movies, not burdened by all the vibrations of anxiety, fear or desire that his mother may have conscientiously accumulated in her womb through entertaining reading, debilitating films or a torn home life for everything is recorded, the slightest vibration, the least shock; everything enters the embryo freely, remains and accumulates there. The Greeks knew this well, and the Egyptians and the Indians, who used to surround the mother with special conditions of beauty and harmony so that the breath of the gods could pervade each day and each breath of the child, so that everything could be an inspiration of truth. And when the mother and father decided to have a child, they did it as a prayer, a sacrifice for incarnating the gods of the future. It takes only a spark of aspiration, a flame of entreaty, a luminous breath in the mother's heart for the same light to answer and come down, the identical flame, the kindred intensity of life if we are gray and dull, we will summon only the grayness and nothingness of millions of lifeless men.

1.13 - Under the Auspices of the Gods, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga   what remained of pure communism? What remains even of Christ beneath the mass of dogmas and Prohibitions? Socrates was poisoned,   and Rimbaud fled to the Abyssinian desert; we know the fate of the Fourierists, of nonviolence; the Cathars wound up at the stake. History keeps turning like a Moloch. We may now appear to be a "triumph"

1.15 - The world overrun with trees; they are destroyed by the Pracetasas, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism   [7]: 'They are removed', which the commentator explains by 'are absorbed, as if they were fast asleep;' but in every age or Yuga, according to the text-in every Manvantara, according to the comment-the Ṛṣis reappear, the circumstances of their origin only being varied. Dakṣa therefore, as remarked in the preceding note, is the son of Brahmā in one period, the son of the Pracetasas in another. So Soma, in the Svāyambhuva Manvantara, was born as the son of Atri; in the Cākṣuṣa, he was produced by churning the ocean. The words of our text occur in the Hari Vaṃśa, with an unimportant variation: 'Birth and obstruction are constant in all beings, but Ṛṣis and those men who are wise are not perplexed by this;' that is, not, as rendered above, by the alternation of life and death; but, according to the commentator on the Hari Vaṃśa, by a very different matter, the Prohibition of unlawful marriages. Utpatti, 'birth of progeny,' is the result of their will; Nirodha, 'obstruction,' is the law prohibiting the intermarriage of persons connected by the offering of the funeral cake; to which Ṛṣis and sages are not subject, either from their matrimonial unions being merely platonic, or from the bad example set by Brahmā, who, according to the Vedas, approached his own daughter; we have already had occasion to advert to (p. 51. n. 5). The explanation of the text, however, given by the commentator appears forced, and less natural than the interpretation preferred above.   [8]: This is the usual account of Dakṣa's marriage, and is that of the Mahābhārata, Adi P. (p. 113), and of the Brāhma Purāṇa, which the Hari Vaṃśa, in the first part, repeats. In another portion, the Puṣkara Māhātmya, however, Dakṣa, it is said, converts half himself into a female, by whom he begets the daughters presently to be noticed: ###. This seems to be merely a new edition of an old story.

1.17 - The Burden of Royalty, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   Prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is not to   contri bute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to restrain   --   king of Dahomey himself is subject to the Prohibition of beholding   the sea, and so are the kings of Loango and Great Ardra in Guinea.   --   to certain quaint Prohibitions or taboos, on the due observance of   which the prosperity of the people of the country, as well as their

1.18 - Evocation, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism   If the simplified method is offered by a being who, at the same time requests the magician not to write down the procedure, but just to remember it well, the magician must respect such a request. Even if the magician is allowed to make some provisional notes on this abridged procedure, these notes, like the whole book of formulae, must never get into the hands of other people, not even into the hands of a genuine magician, the only exception being those cases where the being, the originator of the simplified procedure, agrees to the magician's handing the procedure over to somebody else, or even asks for this. Otherwise the magician should never dare to evade a Prohibition or even break it, unless he does not mind his authority being shaken. What this would mean for a magician need not be further discussed here.   A being first appears to a magician in the same manner as it is accustomed to move about in its own native zone. If the magician is not pleased with the way in which the being appears, he may, by means of his magical authority, cause the being to appear in the shape he approves of. There are no restrictions in this respect, and it is up to the magician to decide which shape the being evoked should , by help of his imagination, take on. The sex, too, is in this case of no consequence. The magician will, however, do well not to insist, for instance, in a being's appearing in a male shape, if in its relevant sphere it has been a female creature, although the being would have to do even this, should the magician insist upon it. Therefore, beginners in magic operations are recommended to let a being appear in the shape familiar to its own zone.

1.18 - The Perils of the Soul, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   Prohibitions or taboos, which are nothing but rules intended to   ensure either the continued presence or the return of the soul. In

12.05 - Beauty, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   There is a certain state of Yogic consciousness in which all things become beautiful to the eye of the seer, simply because they spiritually are - because they are a rendering in line and form of the quality and force of existence, of the consciousness, of the Ananda that rules the worlds, - of the hidden Divine. What a thing is to the exterior sense may not be, often is not beautiful for the ordinary aesthetic vision, but the Yogin sees in it the something More which the external does not see, he sees the soul behind, the self and spirit, he sees to the lines, hues, harmonies and expressive dispositions which are not to the first surface sight visible or something that is in himself, transmutes it by adding out of his own being to it - as the artist too does something of the same kind but in another way. It is not quite that however, - what the Yogin sees, what the artist sees, is there - his is a transmuting vision because it is a revealing vision; he discovers behind what the object appears to be the something More that it is. And so from this point of view of a realised supreme harmony all is or can be subject-matter for the artist because in all he can discover and reveal the Beauty that is everywhere. Again we land ourselves in a devastating catholicity; for here too one cannot pull up short at any given line. It may be a hard saying that one must or may discover and reveal beauty in a pig or its poke or in a parish pump or an advertisement of somebody's pills, and yet something like that seems to be what modern Art and literature are trying with vigour and a conscientious labour to do. By extension one ought to be able to extract beauty equally well out of morality or social reform or a political caucus or allow at least that all these things can, if he wills, become legitimate subjects for the artist. Here too one cannot say that it is on condition he thinks of beauty only and does not make moralising or social reform or a political idea his main object. For if with that idea foremost in his mind he still produces a great work of art, discovering Beauty as he moves to his aim, proving himself in spite of his unaesthetic preoccupations a great artist, it is all we can justly ask from him - whatever his starting point - to be a creator of Beauty. Art is discovery and revelation of Beauty and we can say nothing more by way of Prohibition or limiting rule.     But there is one thing more that can be said, and it makes a big difference. In the Yogin's vision of universal beauty all becomes beautiful, but all is not reduced to a single level. There are gradations, there is a hierarchy in this All-Beauty and we see that it depends on the ascending power (vibhuti) of consciousness and Ananda that expresses itself in the object. All is the Divine, but some things are more divine than others. In the artist's vision too there are or can be gradations, a hierarchy of values.

1.20 - Tabooed Persons, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   IN GENERAL, we may say that the Prohibition to use the vessels,   garments, and so forth of certain persons, and the effects supposed

1.21 - Tabooed Things, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   naturally leads to a Prohibition to touch their sacred persons. Thus   it was unlawful to lay hands on the person of a Spartan king: no one   --   Prohibition to touch raw meat. But as usual the taboo is only the   special enforcement of a general precept; in other words, its   --   circumstances the Prohibition is also observed, though less   strictly, as a common rule of life. Thus some of the Esthonians will   --   happens with taboos of universal application, the Prohibition to   spill the blood of a tribesman on the ground applies with peculiar

1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   Prohibition to use the names of the dead is not permanent, though it   may last for many years. In some Australian tribes the change of   --   tribes the Prohibition to mention the names of the dead remained in   force only during the period of mourning; in the Port Lincoln tribe   --   Polynesia we find the same systematic Prohibition to utter the names   of chiefs or of common words resembling them which we have already

1.31 - Is Thelema a New Religion?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   Religion, he says, Latin: religio, piety. Collection or paying attention to: religens as opposed to negligens, neglecting; the attitude of Gallio. But it also implies a binding together i.e. of ideas; in fact, a "body of doctrine." Not a bad expression. A religion then, is a more or less coherent and consistent set of beliefs, with precepts and Prohibitions therefrom deducible. But then there is the sense in which Frazer (and I) often use the word: as in opposition to "Science" or "Magic." Here the point is that religious people attribute phenomena to the will of some postulated Being or Beings, placable and moveable by virtue of sacrifice, devotion, or appeal. Against such, the scientific or magical mind believes in the Laws of Nature, asserts "If A, then B" if you do so-and-so, the result will be so-and-so, aloof from arbitrary interference. Joshua, it is alleged, made the sun stand still by supplication, and Hezekiah in the same way cause it to "go back upon the dial of Ahaz;" Willett did it by putting the clock back, and getting an Act of Parliament to confirm his lunacy. Petruchio, too "It shall be what o'clock I say it is!" The two last came close to the magical method; at least, to that branch of it which consists of "fooling all the people all the time." But such an operation, if true Magick were employed, would be beyond the power of any magician of my acquaintance; for it would mess up the solar system completely. (You remember how this happened, and what came of it, in a rather clever short story by H.G. Wells.) For true Magick means "to employ one set of natural forces at a mechanical advantage as against another set" I quote, as closely as memory serves, Thomas Henry Huxley, when he explains that when he lifts his water-jug or his elbow he does not "defy the Law of Gravitation." On the contrary, he uses that Law; its equations form part of the system by which he lifts the jug without spilling the water.   To sum up, our system is a religion just so far as a religion means an enthusiastic putting-together of a series of doctrines, no one of which must in any way clash with Science or Magick.

1.51 - Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   partake of it, which Prohibition is regarded as a great misfortune   for him." Women are not allowed to eat liver, because they have no

1.60 - Between Heaven and Earth, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   on certain occasions, and to whom accordingly the Prohibition in   question only applies at the definite seasons during which they   --   the North Pacific Coast most strongly, such as the Prohibition to   the girl to touch or scratch her head with her hand, a special

1.69 - Farewell to Nemi, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   not yet registered, we know of no Prohibition against accepting   donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to

1955-05-18 - The Problem of Woman - Men and women - The Supreme Mother, the new creation - Gods and goddesses - A story of Creation, earth - Psychic being only on earth, beings everywhere - Going to other worlds by occult means, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Drunkenness, you dont know what drunkenness is? Drunkenness means to drink alcohol, and it is something very widespread, unfortunately, over the whole earth, and it is men who drink, usually. Among the working classes, as soon as they have received their pay they go and drink away more than half of it, and when the wife goes to ask them for money to get food for them, she gets a beating. Thats how things usually occur. And the Swedish Government had tried for a very long time, because these people were quite reasonable and found that it was one of the things which most harmed social peace; but they had never succeeded. But it seems that within something like two or three years of government, women succeeded in doing it. And it was finished, one heard no more about it. How they did it I dont remember now. Someone had told me then. Naturally, not by Prohibition, because wherever that has been tried, it has never succeeded. But they succeeded. It is there. Now it is there. It took more than half a century to spread. Now there are many countries in which women are in the Government.   (To Pavitra) Are there any in France? Are there women members of Parliament?

1957-08-07 - The resistances, politics and money - Aspiration to realise the supramental life, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   There. This is the situation. It has grown considerably worse since the last war; it grows worse year by year, and one finds oneself in such a ridiculous situation that, unfortunately, as one is at the end of ones resources, to simplify what has been made so complicated, there is an idea in the earth-atmospherean idea which might be called preposterous, but unhappily it is much worse than preposterous, it is catastrophic the idea that if there were a great upheaval, perhaps it would be better afterwards. One is so jammed between Prohibitions, impossibilities, interdictions, rules, the complications of every second, that one feels stifled and really gets the admirable idea that if everything were demolished perhaps it would be better afterwards!. It is in the air. And all the governments have put themselves in such impossible conditions; they have become so tied up that it seems to them they will have to break everything to be able to move forward. (Silence) This is unfortunately a little more than a possibility, it is a very serious threat. And it is not quite certain that life will not be made still more impossible because one feels incapable of emerging from the chaos the chaos of complicationsin which humanity has put itself. It is like the shadow but unfortunately a very active shadowof the new hope which has sprung up in the human consciousness, a hope and a need for something more harmonious; and the need becomes so much more acute as life, as it is at present organised, becomes more and more contrary to it. The two opposites are facing each other with such intensity that one can expect something like an explosion.   (Silence)

1963 01 14, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    But everything that persists, that tries to cling and endure, all these Prohibitions and this habit of cutting life in twointo small things and big things, the sacred and the profane. What! say the people who profess to follow a spiritual life, how can you make such little things, such insignificant things the object of spiritual experience? And yet this is an experience that becomes more and more concrete and real, even materially; its not that there are some things where the Lord is and some things where He is not. The Lord is always there. He takes nothing seriously, everything amuses Him and He plays with you, if you know how to play. You do not know how to play, people do not know how to play. But how well He knows how to play! How well He plays! With everything, with the smallest things: you have some things to put on the table? Dont feel that you have to think and arrange, no, lets play: lets put this one here and that one there, and this one like that. And then another time its different again. What a good game and such fun!    So, it is agreed, we shall try to learn how to laugh with the Lord.

1.rb - Bishop Blougram's Apology, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry   All Prohibition to lie, kill and thieve,   Or even to be an atheistic priest!

2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen   Prohibitions which his environment imposes on him without   his either understanding or caring to understand the reason for

2.03 - The Pyx, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity   the learned, their assertions and their Prohibitions,   their refusal to allow the universe to move all

2.08 - On Non-Violence, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen    Mahatmaji's silent day and the conclusion of his talk with the Swarajists came up. He wants the Swarajists to take up the constructive programme in the councils e.g., Khaddar and Prohibition; in case of failure in getting them through, to resort to civil disobedience.    Sri Aurobindo: But in that case again there may be another Chauri Chora!

2.1.7.08 - Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Cant see the validity of any Prohibition of double adjectives in abundance. If a slow rich wealth-burdened movement is the right thing, as it certainly is here in my judgment, the necessary means have to be used to bring it aboutand the double adjective is admirably suited for the purpose.   25 October 1936

2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen    Disciple: The Bombay Premier has approached the merchants for donations to his government as there is a substantial loss of revenue due to Prohibition. He told them that if they didn't donate, new taxation would have to be levied.    Sri Aurobindo: It is better not to destroy the capitalist class as the socialists want to. They are the source of national wealth. They should be encouraged to spend for the nation. Taxing is all right, but you must increase production, start new industries, and raise the standard of living. Without all that, if you merely increase the taxes there will be a state of depression. Other nations can tax enormously because they produce also on a large scale.

2.3.2 - Desire, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   But man has also a mind and, as he develops, he learns to control his vital and physical nature by his reason and by his will. This control is very partial: for the reason is often deluded by vital desires and the ignorance of the physical and it puts itself on their side and tries to justify by its ideas, reasonings or arguments their mistakes and wrong movements. Even if the reason keeps free and tells the vital or the body, Do not do this, yet the vital and the body often follow their own movement in spite of the Prohibitionmans mental will is not strong enough to compel them.   When people do sadhana, there is a higher Nature that works within, the psychic and spiritual, and they have to put their nature under the influence of the psychic being and the higher spiritual self or of the Divine. Not only the vital and the body but the mind also has to learn the Divine Truth and obey the divine rule. But because of the lower nature and its continued hold on them, they are unable at first and for a long time to prevent their nature from following the old wayseven when they know or are told from within what to do or what not to do. It is only by persistent sadhana, by getting into the higher spiritual consciousness and spiritual nature that this difficulty can be overcome; but even for the strongest and best sadhaks it takes a long time.

2.4.02 - Bhakti, Devotion, Worship, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   The scientific explanation [for the disappearance of food offered to a deity in a temple] would be that somebody, a servant perhaps, disregarding Prohibitions got secretly in and polished off the food of offering when there was nobody to see! That however assumes that occult manifestations are impossible, which is not the case; it is besides only a probable inference or theory. Occultists, or some of them, hold that the food offered to unseen beings is sometimes (but not by any means always) taken in its subtle elements, leaving the outward body of the food as it was. The actual taking of the food, physically, is rare, but instances are believed to have happened where the bhakti was very strong.   ***

3.00.2 - Introduction, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   which is not liked and desired generally requires no Prohibition. In my   opinion, each of these interpretations is justified up to a point, because all

30.03 - Spirituality in Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Is there any natural opposition between art and the spiritual life? The Puritans had cast aside poetry and music like poison. In the Talmud (the scripture of the Jews) there is the total Prohibition to draw the picture of anybody, be he a man or a God. Plato in his Republicrefused to award a locus to the poet. Even in the world of to-day, behind the externals we are after Idealism that awakens the higher emotions, the spiritual perception, and inspires the spiritual life in poetry, music, painting and sculpture. We want to do away with mundane art and have the art that helps to acquaint us with God. We want to turn our eyes from the art that depicts the lower propensities of our nature and like to gaze at the one that gives us a higher, nobler and purer inspiration.    The spiritual knowledge is the supreme knowledge, and the rest is the ordinary knowledge. The spiritual life is alone the best and the only thing worth aspiring for. If this is the only truth then men will aspire for nothing except that which is helpful to the spiritual life. Men will keep aloof from whatever is an obstacle to it. Every branch of the ordinary knowledge should be made into a step towards the supreme knowledge. If there is any glory or beauty in the world then it belongs to God. So the usefulness of the ordinary knowledge lies in being subservient to the supreme Knowledge. To-day we want to found this thesis. But how far is it correct, what is its precise meaning? At the very outset we would like to say that the object of art is to create joy. There is one joy in God-realisation, and another in the company of a woman: an artist can make a joyful creation out of either of the two. The depiction of the company of a woman may be harmful to the spiritual life, but, from the standpoint of the creation of pure and simple joy, is there any hard and fast rule that its value should be low? The critic may say: "God alone is the repository of the complete joy. In the ordinary worldly life there is no lack of joy or beauty, but that joy or beauty is a portion or a shadow of God himself, a major part of it being a deformation. The story of the enjoyment of a woman may be very fascinating, but if we do not find in it anything that may lead our vision to and draw out the sweetness of God then from the side of the creation of taste too it falls short of the perfect perfection. If art were to exist in the creation of taste anyhow then the artist might deal with any subject to fulfil his object by any means. But if he wants to create the highest taste, the fulness of taste, let him manifest God in speech, painting and sculpture."

3.2.1 - Food, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   I think the importance of sattwic food from the spiritual point of view has been exaggerated. Food is rather a question of hygiene and many of the sanctions and Prohibitions laid down in ancient religions had more a hygienic than a spiritual motive. The Gitas definitions seem to point in the same directiontamasic food, it seems to say, is what is stale or rotten with the virtue gone out of it, rajasic food is that which is too acrid, pungent etc., heats the blood and spoils the health, sattwic food is what is pleasing, healthy etc. It may well be that different kinds of food nourish the action of the different gunas and so indirectly are helpful or harmful apart from their physical action. But that is as far as we can confidently go. What particular eatables are or are not sattwic is another question and more difficult to determine. Spiritually, I should say that the effect of food depends more on the occult atmosphere and influences that come with it than on anything in the food itself. Vegetarianism is another question altogether; it stands, as you say, on a will not to do harm to the more conscious forms of life for the satisfaction of the belly.   As to the question of practising to take all kinds of food with equal rasa, it is not necessary to practise nor does it really come by practice. One has to acquire equality within in the consciousness and as this equality grows one can extend it or apply it to the various fields of the activity of the consciousness.

3.2.4 - Sex, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Anyway, the dream kind is not so much to trouble about, unless it is frequentit is the waking state that must be rigorously cleared out. Sometimes, if that is done, there is automatic extension of the habit of rejection to the subconscient, so that when the dream is coming there is an automatic Prohibition that stops it. Under a regime like that I think the sex-pressure would become, if not non-existent, yet permanently quiescent in its seed state and so practically non est.   ***   --   It is a mistake to make so much of emissionseverybody has them. The subconscient has its own movement and the want of control there is a thing one can get rid of only when there is the full light down there. At most one can deal with this special factor by putting a will into the subconscient (in the sex-centre or the organ itself) for Prohibition, so that even in the subconscient during sleep there may be something that reacts. Many have been able to diminish and almost get rid of the recurrence by this means, but others have succeeded less well. In one case there was a recurrence every fortnight and that stood in spite of the will. As for the waking difficulty do not make too much of it. Press on with the positive side of the sadhana towards realisation these things will fade and disappear when the higher consciousness is down in the sex-centre. Meanwhile it has first to be controlled and got rid of as much as possible.   ***

3.7.1.12 - Karma and Justice, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   The ordinary current conception of law of Karma is dominantly ethical, but ethical in no very exalted kind. Its idea of karma is a mechanical and materialistic ethics, a crudely exact legal judgment and administration of reward and punishment, an external sanction to virtue and Prohibition of sin, a code, a balance. The idea is that there must be a justice governing the award of happiness and misery on the earth, a humanly intelligible equity and that the law of Karma represents it and gives us its formula. I have done so much good, puya. It is my capital, my accumulation and balance. I must have it paid out to me in so much coin of prosperity, the legal currency of this sovereign and divine Themis, or why on earth should I at all do good? I have done so much evil. That too must come back to me in so much exact and accurate punishment and misfortune. There must be so much outward suffering or an inward suffering caused by outward event and pressure; for if there were not this physically sensible, visible, inevitable result, where would be any avenging justice and where could we find any deterrent sanction in Nature against evil? And this award is that of an exact judge, a precise administrator, a scrupulous merchant of good for good and evil for evil who has learned nothing and will never learn anything of the Christian or Buddhistic ideal rule, has no bowels of mercy or compassion, no forgiveness for sin, but holds austerely to an eternal Mosaic law, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, a full, slow or swift, but always calm and precisely merciless lex talionis.   This commercial and mathematical accountant is sometimes supposed to act with a startling precision. A curious story was published the other day, figuring as a fact of contemporary occurrence, of a rich man who had violently deprived another of his substance. The victim is born as the son of the oppressor and in the delirium of a fatal illness reveals that he has obliged his old tyrant and present father to spend on him and so lose the monetary equivalent of the property robbed minus a certain sum, but that sum must be paid now, otherwise The debt is absolved and as the last pice is expended, the reborn soul departs, for its sole object in taking birth is satisfied, accounts squared and the spirit of Karma content. That is the mechanical idea of Karma at its acme of satisfied precision. At the same time the popular mind in its attempt to combine the idea of a life beyond with the notion of rebirth, supposes a double prize for virtue and a double penalty for transgression. I am rewarded for my good deeds in heaven after death until the dynamic value of my virtue is exhausted and I am then reborn and rewarded again materially on earth. I am punished in hell to the equivalence of my sins and again punished for them in another life in the body. This looks a little superfluous and a rather redundant justice, and, even, the precise accountant becomes very like an unconscionable hundred per cent usurer. Perhaps it may be said that beyond earth it is the soul that suffers for purification, and here the physical beingas a concession to the forces of life and the symmetry of things: but still it is the soul that thus pays double in its subtle experience and in its physical incarnation.

3.7.2.02 - The Terrestial Law, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Mans exceeding of the physical law does not come solely by his evolution of a moral sense in a non-moral world of Nature. Its essential rule is rather a turning of a conscious intelligence and will on life and matter, morality itself only this knowledge and will seeking for a rule of truth and right of action, satyam tam, in his relation to his inner self and to his fellow-beings. But his dealings with the purely physical lines of Nature are non-moral, a matter at first of observance where he must, of satisfaction by instinctive or experienced utilisings, of suffering at her hands by compulsion, and more and more, as he grows, of a struggle of his knowledge and will to know and master her forces for his use and pleasure, for instruments and expedients, for a greater base and circle of opportunities, for the joy itself of will and knowledge. He makes her forces his opportunities and to increase them faces her perils. He defies her powers, transgresses her limitations, sins constantly against her first Prohibitions, takes her punishments and overcomes them, becomes by wrestling of his mind and will with her acquainted with her greater possibilities which she herself has left unused while she waited for his coming. She meets his effort with physical obstruction and opposition, with a No that constantly recedes, with the mask of his own ignorance, with the menace of her danger. One might suggest the fancy,attri buting to her that resistance which certain instincts in man oppose to the daring of spiritual adventure, to new enlargings of knowledge, new forms of will or new standards of conduct, regarding them stupidly as sin and impiety because they transgress what is established,that to physical Nature in her first power life itself with its starts and deviations and stumblings and sufferings is a sin against her law of sure physical harmony and exact measure and much more mind with its daring, its sin of boundless adventure, its final yearnings towards the unmeasured, the above-law, the infinite.   But in fact all that the godhead of physical Nature is concerned with in mans dealings with her is to observe a just law of return of her energies to his effort.Wherever his knowledge and will can harmonise itself with the lines of her energies, she makes a return according to its action on her: where it works on her with insufficiency, ignorance, carelessness, error, she overwhelms his effort or injures; as he wills more and discovers more, she returns to him a greater utility and fruit of her powers, consents to his masteries and favours his violences. He has arrived at a unity, a Yoga with her in her greater secret possibilities,he has liberated them and, as he uses them, so he has from her their return. He observes and he extends for her her lines and she responds with an exact ministry and obedience. All this he can do at present within certain physical limits and lines of working and there is a modification but not a radical change. There are indications that by a more direct pressure of a mental and psychical energy on the physical, the response can be made more variable, the physical depart from what seem to be fixed limits and habits, and it is conceivable that as knowledge and will entered into the region of higher and yet higher powers, the action of physical energy might grow entirely responsive, giving whatever return is seemingly demanded from her, and its lines perfectly flexible. But even this transcendence would have to regard the great original measures fixed by the All-Will: there could be a free use, perhaps a large transformation of the physical energy, but not a departure from its fundamental law and purpose.

3.7.2.03 - Mind Nature and Law of Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   At first however the moral conceptions of man and the direction and output and the demand of return of the ethical energy in him get themselves inextricably mixed with his vital conceptions and demands and even afterwards lean on them very commonly and very considerably for a support and incentive. Human morality first takes up an enormous mass of customary rules of action, a conventional and traditional practice much of which is of a very doubtful moral value, gives to it an imperative sanction of right and slips into the crude mass or superimposes on it, but still as a part of one common and equal code, the true things of the ethical ideal. It appeals to the vital being, his desires, hopes and fears, incites man to virtue by the hope of rewards and the dread of punishment, imitating in this device the method of his crude and fumbling social practice: for that, finding its law and rule which, good or bad, it wishes to make imperative as supposing it to be at least the best calculated for the order and efficiency of the community, opposed by mans vital being, bribes and terrifies as well as influences, educates and persuades him to acceptance. Morality tells man, accommodating itself to his imperfection, mostly through the mouth of religion, that the moral law is imperative in itself, but also that it is very expedient for him personally to follow it, righteousness in the end the safest policy, virtue the best paymaster in the long run,for this is a world of Law or a world ruled by a just and virtuous or at least virtue-loving God. He is assured that the righteous man shall prosper and the wicked perish and that the paths of virtue lie through pleasant places. Or, if this will not serve, since it is palpably false in experience and even man cannot always deceive himself, it offers him a security of vital rewards denied here but conceded in some hereafter. Heaven and hell, happiness and suffering in other lives are put before him as the bribe and the menace. He is told, the better to satisfy his easily satisfied intellect, that the world is governed by an ethical law which determines the measure of his earthly fortunes, that a justice reigns and this is justice, that every action has its exact rebound and his good shall bring him good and his evil evil. It is these notions, this idea of the moral law, of righteousness and justice as a thing in itself imperative, but still needing to be enforced by bribe and menace on our human nature,which would seem to show that at least for that nature they are not altogether imperative,this insistence on reward and punishment because morality struggling with our first unregenerate being has to figure very largely as a mass of restraints and Prohibitions and these cannot be enforced without some fact or appearance of a compelling or inducing outward sanction, this diplomatic compromise or effort at equivalence between the impersonal ethical and the personal egoistic demand, this marriage of convenience between right and vital utility, virtue and desire,it is these accommodations that are embodied in the current notions of the law of Karma.   What real truth is there behind the current notions of Karma in the actual facts or the fundamental powers of the life of man here or the visible working of the law of the energies of the cosmos? There is evidently a substantial truth, but it is a part only of the whole; its reign or predominance belongs to a certain element only, to the emphasis of one line among many of a transitional movement between the law of the vital energy and a greater and higher law of the mind and spirit. A mixture of any two kinds of energy sets up a mixed and complex action of the output of the energy and the return, and a too sharp-cut rule affixing vital returns to a mental and moral output of force is open to much exception and it cannot be the whole inner truth of the matter. But still where the demand is for the vital return, for success, an outer happiness, good, fortune, that is a sign of the dominant intention in the energy and points to a balance of forces weighing in the indicated direction. At first sight, if success is the desideratum, it is not clear what morality has to say in the affair, since we see in most things that it is a right understanding and intelligent or intuitive practice of the means and conditions and an insistent power of the will, a settled drive of the force of the being of which success is the natural consequence. Man may impose by a system of punishments a check on the egoistic will and intelligence in pursuit of its vital ends, may create a number of moral conditions for the worlds prizes, but this might appear, as is indeed contended in certain vitalistic theories, an artificial imposition on Nature and a dulling and impoverishment of the free and powerful play of the mind force and the life force in their alliance. But in truth the greatest force for success is a right concentration of energy, tapasy, and there is an inevitable moral element in Tapasya.   --   A second line of Karmic response of the cosmic forces to our action puts on also an appearance which tempts us to give it a moral character. For there can be distinguished in Nature a certain element of the law of the talion orperhaps a more appropriate figure, since this action seems rather mechanical than rational and deliberatea boomerang movement of energy returning upon its transmitter. The stone we throw is flung back by some hidden force in the world life upon ourselves, the action we put out upon others recoils, not always by a direct reaction, but often by devious and unconnected routes, on our own lives and sometimes, though that is by no means a common rule, in its own exact figure or measure. This is a phenomenon so striking to our imagination and impressive to our moral sense and vital feelings that it has received some kind of solemn form and utterance in the thought of all cultures,What thou hast done, thou must suffer, He that uses the sword shall perish by the sword; Thou hast sown the wind and thou shalt reap the whirlwind;and we are tempted to erect it into a universal rule and accept it as sufficient evidence of a moral order. But the careful thinker will pause long before he hastens to subscribe to any such conclusion, for there is much that militates against it and this kind of definite reaction is rather exceptional than an ordinary rule of human life. If it were a regular feature, men would soon learn the code of the draconic impersonal legislator and know what to avoid and the list of lifes Prohibitions and vetoes. But there is no such clear penal legislation of Nature.   The mathematical precision of physical Natures action and reaction cannot indeed be expected from mental and vital Nature. For not only does everything become infinitely more subtle, complex and variable as we rise in the scale so that in our life action there is an extraordinary intertwining of forces and mixture of many values, but, even, the psychological and moral value of the same action differs in different cases, according to the circumstance, the conditions, the motive and mind of the doer. The law of the talion is no just or ethical rule when applied by man to men and, applied by superhuman dispenser of justice or impersonal law with a rude rule of thumb to the delicate and intricate tangle of mans life action and life motives, it would be no better. And it is evident too that the slow, long and subtle purposes of the universal Power working in the human race would be defeated rather than served by any universality of this too precise and summary procedure. Accordingly we find that its working is occasional and intermittent rather than regular, variable and to our minds capricious rather than automatic and plainly intelligible.

4.13 - The Action of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   The perfected action of equality transforms all the values of things on the basis of the divine anandamaya power. The outward action may remain what it was or may change, that must be as the Spirit directs and according to the need of the work to be done for the world, -- but the whole inner action is of another kind. The shakti in its different powers of knowledge, action, enjoyment, creation, formulation, will direct itself to the different aims of existence, but in another spirit; they will be the aims, the fruits, the lines of working laid down by the Divine from his light above, not anything claimed by the ego for its own separate sake. The mind, the heart, the vital being, the body itself will be satisfied with whatever comes to them from the dispensation of the Master of the being and in that find a subtlest and yet fullest spiritualised satisfaction and delight; but the divine knowledge and will above will work forward towards its farther ends. Here both success and failure lose their present meanings. There can be no failure; for whatever happens is the intention of the Master of the worlds, not final, but a step on his way, and if it appears as an opposition, a defeat, a denial, even for the moment a total denial of the aim set before the instrumental being, it is so only in appearance and afterwards it will appear in its right place in the economy of his action, -- a fuller supramental vision may even see at once or beforeh and its necessity and its true relation to the eventual result to which it seems so contrary and even perhaps its definite Prohibition. Or, if -- while the light is deficient, -- there has been a misinterpretation whether with regard to the aim or the course of the action and the steps of the result, the failure comes as a rectification and is calmly accepted without bringing discouragement or a fluctuation of the will. In the end it is found that there is no such thing as failure and the soul takes an equal passive or active delight in all happenings as the steps and formulations of the divine Will. The same evolution takes place with regard to good fortune and ill fortune, the pleasant and the unpleasant in every form, mangala amangala, priya apriya.   And as with happenings, so with persons, equality brings an entire change of the view and the attitude. The first result of the equal mind and spirit is to bring about an increasing charity and inner toleration of all persons, ideas, views, actions, because it is seen that God is in all beings and each acts according to his nature, his svabhara, and its present formulations. When there is the positive equal Ananda, this deepens to a sympathetic understanding and in the end an equal universal love. None of these things need prevent various relations or different formulations of the inner attitude according to the need of life as determined by the spiritual will, or firm furtherings of this idea, view, action against that other for the same need and purpose by the same determination, or a strong outward or inward resistance, opposition and action against the forces that are impelled to stand in the way of the decreed movement. And there may be even the rush of the Rudra energy forcefully working upon or shattering the human or other obstacle, because that is necessary both for him and for the world purpose. But the essence of the equal inmost attitude is not altered or diminished by these more superficial formulations. The spirit, the fundamental soul remain the same, even while the shakti of knowledge, will, action, love does its work and assumes the various forms needed for its work. And in the end all becomes a form of a luminous spiritual unity with all persons, energies, things in the being of God and in the luminous, spiritual, one and universal force, in which one's own action becomes an inseparable part of the action of all, is not divided from it, but feels perfectly every relation as a relation with God in all in the complex terms of his universal oneness. That is a plenitude which can hardly be described in the language of the dividing mental reason for it uses all its oppositions, yet escapes from them, nor can it be put in the terms of our limited mental psychology. It belongs to another domain of consciousness, another plane of our being.

4.2.03 - The Birth of Sin, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   I feel, a Prohibition. Someone used   A word I could not grasp and called it sin.

5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   the decisive convictions, Prohibitions, and wise counsels ema-   6 Even if one accepts the view that a self-revelation of spirit an apparition for

6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   Prohibition, 236   projection (s), 6, 25, 59/, 63, 65, 101,

Apology, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no Prohibition   against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who

Appendix 4 - Priest Spells, #Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E, #unset, #Zen         When the priest casts a sanctuary spell, any opponent attempting to strike or otherwise directly attack the protected creature must roll a saving throw vs. spell. If the saving throw is successful, the opponent can attack normally and is unaffected by that casting of the spell. If the saving throw is failed, the opponent loses track of and totally ignores the warded creature for the duration of the spell. Those not attempting to attack the subject remain unaffected. Note that this spell does not prevent the operation of area attacks (fireball, ice storm, etc.). While protected by this spell, the subject cannot take direct offensive action without breaking the spell, but may use nonattack spells or otherwise act in any way that does not violate the Prohibition against offensive action. This allows a warded priest to heal wounds, for example, or to bless, perform an augury, chant, cast a light in the area (but not upon an opponent), and so on.         The components of the spell include the priest's holy symbol and a small silver mirror.

BOOK I. - Augustine censures the pagans, who attributed the calamities of the world, and especially the sack of Rome by the Goths, to the Christian religion and its prohibition of the worship of the gods, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   object:BOOK I. - Augustine censures the pagans, who attributed the calamities of the world, and especially the sack of Rome by the Goths, to the Christian religion and its Prohibition of the worship of the gods   author class:Saint Augustine of Hippo   --     AUGUSTINE CENSURES THE PAGANS, WHO ATTRIBUTED THE CALAMITIES OF THE WORLD, AND ESPECIALLY THE RECENT SACK OF ROME BY THE GOTHS, TO THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, AND ITS Prohibition OF THE WORSHIP OF THE GODS. HE SPEAKS OF THE BLESSINGS AND ILLS OF LIFE, WHICH THEN, AS ALWAYS, HAPPENED TO GOOD AND BAD MEN ALIKE. FINALLY, HE REBUKES THE SHAMELESSNESS OF THOSE WHO CAST UP TO THE CHRISTIANS THAT THEIR WOMEN HAD BEEN VIOLATED BY THE SOLDIERS.   PREFACE, EXPLAINING HIS DESIGN IN UNDERTAKING THIS WORK.   --   But among their own famous men they have a very noble example of the voluntary endurance of captivity in obedience to a religious scruple. Marcus Attilius Regulus, a Roman general, was a prisoner in the hands of the Carthaginians. But they, being more anxious to exchange their prisoners with the Romans than to keep them, sent Regulus as a special envoy with their own ambassadors to negotiate this exchange, but bound him first with an oath, that if he failed to accomplish their wish, he would return to Carthage. He went, and persuaded the senate to the opposite course, because he[Pg 23] believed it was not for the advantage of the Roman republic to make an exchange of prisoners. After he had thus exerted his influence, the Romans did not compel him to return to the enemy; but what he had sworn he voluntarily performed. But the Carthaginians put him to death with refined, elaborate, and horrible tortures. They shut him up in a narrow box, in which he was compelled to stand, and in which finely sharpened nails were fixed all round about him, so that he could not lean upon any part of it without intense pain; and so they killed him by depriving him of sleep.[71] With justice, indeed, do they applaud the virtue which rose superior to so frightful a fate. However, the gods he swore by were those who are now supposed to avenge the Prohibition of their worship, by inflicting these present calamities on the human race. But if these gods, who were worshipped specially in this behalf, that they might confer happiness in this life, either willed or permitted these punishments to be inflicted on one who kept his oath to them, what more cruel punishment could they in their anger have inflicted on a perjured person? But why may I not draw from my reasoning a double inference? Regulus certainly had such reverence for the gods, that for his oath's sake he would neither remain in his own land, nor go elsewhere, but without hesitation returned to his bitterest enemies. If he thought that this course would be advantageous with respect to this present life, he was certainly much deceived, for it brought his life to a frightful termination. By his own example, in fact, he taught that the gods do not secure the temporal happiness of their worshippers; since he himself, who was devoted to their worship, was both conquered in battle and taken prisoner, and then, because he refused to act in violation of the oath he had sworn by them, was tortured and put to death by a new, and hitherto unheard of, and all too horrible kind of punishment. And on the supposition that the worshippers of the gods are rewarded by felicity in the life to come, why, then, do they calumniate the influence of Christianity? why do they assert that this[Pg 24] disaster has overtaken the city because it has ceased to worship its gods, since, worship them as assiduously as it may, it may yet be as unfortunate as Regulus was? Or will some one carry so wonderful a blindness to the extent of wildly attempting, in the face of the evident truth, to contend that though one man might be unfortunate, though a worshipper of the gods, yet a whole city could not be so? That is to say, the power of their gods is better adapted to preserve multitudes than individuals,as if a multitude were not composed of individuals.   But if they say that M. Regulus, even while a prisoner and enduring these bodily torments, might yet enjoy the blessedness of a virtuous soul,[72] then let them recognise that true virtue by which a city also may be blessed. For the blessedness of a community and of an individual flow from the same source; for a community is nothing else than a harmonious collection of individuals. So that I am not concerned meantime to discuss what kind of virtue Regulus possessed: enough, that by his very noble example they are forced to own that the gods are to be worshipped not for the sake of bodily comforts or external advantages; for he preferred to lose all such things rather than offend the gods by whom he had sworn. But what can we make of men who glory in having such a citizen, but dread having a city like him? If they do not dread this, then let them acknowledge that some such calamity as befell Regulus may also befall a community, though they be worshipping their gods as diligently as he; and let them no longer throw the blame of their misfortunes on Christianity. But as our present concern is with those Christians who were taken prisoners, let those who take occasion from this calamity to revile our most wholesome religion in a fashion not less imprudent than impudent, consider this and hold their peace; for if it was no reproach to their gods that a most punctilious worshipper of theirs should, for the sake of keeping his oath to them, be deprived of his native land without hope of finding another, and fall into the hands of his enemies, and be put to death by a long-drawn and exquisite torture, much less ought the[Pg 25] Christian name to be charged with the captivity of those who believe in its power, since they, in confident expectation of a heavenly country, know that they are pilgrims even in their own homes.

BOOK II. - A review of the calamities suffered by the Romans before the time of Christ, showing that their gods had plunged them into corruption and vice, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   This is the reason why those divinities quite neglected the lives and morals of the cities and nations who worshipped them, and threw no dreadful Prohibition in their way to hinder them from becoming utterly corrupt, and to preserve them from those terrible and detestable evils which visit not harvests and vintages, not house and possessions, not the body which is subject to the soul, but the soul itself, the spirit that rules the whole man. If there was any such Prohibition, let it be produced, let it be proved. They will tell us that purity and probity were inculcated upon those who were initiated in the mysteries of religion, and that secret incitements to virtue were whispered in the ear of the lite; but this is an idle boast. Let them show or name to us the places which were at any time consecrated to assemblages in which, instead of the obscene songs and licentious acting of players, instead of the celebration of those most filthy and shameless Fugalia[Pg 55][90] (well called Fugalia, since they banish modesty and right feeling), the people were commanded in the name of the gods to restrain avarice, bridle impurity, and conquer ambition; where, in short, they might learn in that school which Persius vehemently lashes them to, when he says: "Be taught, ye abandoned creatures, and ascertain the causes of things; what we are, and for what end we are born; what is the law of our success in life, and by what art we may turn the goal without making shipwreck; what limit we should put to our wealth, what we may lawfully desire, and what uses filthy lucre serves; how much we should bestow upon our country and our family; learn, in short, what God meant thee to be, and what place He has ordered you to fill."[91] Let them name to us the places where such instructions were wont to be communicated from the gods, and where the people who worshipped them were accustomed to resort to hear them, as we can point to our churches built for this purpose in every land where the Christian religion is received.     7. That the suggestions of philosophers are precluded from having any moral effect, because they have not the authority which belongs to divine instruction, and because man's natural bias to evil induces him rather to follow the examples of the gods than to obey the precepts of men.

BOOK III. - The external calamities of Rome, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity     31. That it is effrontery to impute the present troubles to Christ and the Prohibition of polytheistic worship, since even when the gods were worshipped such calamities befell the people.   Let those who have no gratitude to Christ for His great benefits, blame their own gods for these heavy disasters. For certainly when these occurred the altars of the gods were kept blazing, and there rose the mingled fragrance of "Saban incense and fresh garlands;"[154] the priests were clothed with honour, the shrines were maintained in splendour; sacrifices,[Pg 133] games, sacred ecstasies, were common in the temples; while the blood of the citizens was being so freely shed, not only in remote places, but among the very altars of the gods. Cicero did not choose to seek sanctuary in a temple, because Mucius had sought it there in vain. But they who most unpardonably calumniate this Christian era, are the very men who either themselves fled for asylum to the places specially dedicated to Christ, or were led there by the barbarians that they might be safe. In short, not to recapitulate the many instances I have cited, and not to add to their number others which it were tedious to enumerate, this one thing I am persuaded of, and this every impartial judgment will readily acknowledge, that if the human race had received Christianity before the Punic wars, and if the same desolating calamities which these wars brought upon Europe and Africa had followed the introduction of Christianity, there is no one of those who now accuse us who would not have attri buted them to our religion. How intolerable would their accusations have been, at least so far as the Romans are concerned, if the Christian religion had been received and diffused prior to the invasion of the Gauls, or to the ruinous floods and fires which desolated Rome, or to those most calamitous of all events, the civil wars! And those other disasters, which were of so strange a nature that they were reckoned prodigies, had they happened since the Christian era, to whom but to the Christians would they have imputed these as crimes? I do not speak of those things which were rather surprising than hurtful,oxen speaking, unborn infants articulating some words in their mothers' wombs, serpents flying, hens and women being changed into the other sex; and other similar prodigies which, whether true or false, are recorded not in their imaginative, but in their historical works, and which do not injure, but only astonish men. But when it rained earth, when it rained chalk, when it rained stonesnot hailstones, but real stonesthis certainly was calculated to do serious damage. We have read in their books that the fires of Etna, pouring down from the top of the mountain to the neighbouring shore, caused the sea to boil, so that rocks were burnt up, and the pitch of ships began to run,a phenomenon incredibly surprising, but at the same time no[Pg 134] less hurtful. By the same violent heat, they relate that on another occasion Sicily was filled with cinders, so that the houses of the city Catina were destroyed and buried under them,a calamity which moved the Romans to pity them, and remit their tri bute for that year. One may also read that Africa, which had by that time become a province of Rome, was visited by a prodigious multitude of locusts, which, after consuming the fruit and foliage of the trees, were driven into the sea in one vast and measureless cloud; so that when they were drowned and cast upon the shore the air was polluted, and so serious a pestilence produced that in the kingdom of Masinissa alone they say there perished 800,000 persons, besides a much greater number in the neighbouring districts. At Utica they assure us that, of 30,000 soldiers then garrisoning it, there survived only ten. Yet which of these disasters, suppose they happened now, would not be attri buted to the Christian religion by those who thus thoughtlessly accuse us, and whom we are compelled to answer? And yet to their own gods they attri bute none of these things, though they worship them for the sake of escaping lesser calamities of the same kind, and do not reflect that they who formerly worshipped them were not preserved from these serious disasters.

BOOK XIII. - That death is penal, and had its origin in Adam's sin, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   The apostle, wishing to show how hurtful a thing sin is, when grace does not aid us, has not hesitated to say that the strength of sin is that very law by which sin is prohibited. "The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law."[578] Most certainly true; for Prohibition increases the desire of illicit action, if righteousness is not so loved that the desire of[Pg 526] sin is conquered by that love. But unless divine grace aid us, we cannot love nor delight in true righteousness. But lest the law should be thought to be an evil, since it is called the strength of sin, the apostle, when treating a similar question in another place, says, "The law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then that which is holy made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful."[579] Exceeding, he says, because the transgression is more heinous when through the increasing lust of sin the law itself also is despised. Why have we thought it worth while to mention this? For this reason, because, as the law is not an evil when it increases the lust of those who sin, so neither is death a good thing when it increases the glory of those who suffer it, since either the former is abandoned wickedly, and makes transgressors, or the latter is embraced for the truth's sake, and makes martyrs. And thus the law is indeed good, because it is Prohibition of sin, and death is evil because it is the wages of sin; but as wicked men make an evil use not only of evil, but also of good things, so the righteous make a good use not only of good, but also of evil things. Whence it comes to pass that the wicked make an ill use of the law, though the law is good; and that the good die well, though death is an evil.   6. Of the evil of death in general, considered as the separation of soul and body.   --   have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no Prohibition   against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who

BOOK XIV. - Of the punishment and results of mans first sin, and of the propagation of man without lust, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   The devil, then, would not have ensnared man in the open and manifest sin of doing what God had forbidden, had man not already begun to live for himself. It was this that made him listen with pleasure to the words, "Ye shall be as gods,"[96] which they would much more readily have accomplished by obediently adhering to their supreme and true end than by proudly living to themselves. For created gods are gods not by virtue of what is in themselves, but by a participation of the true God. By craving to be more, man becomes less; and by aspiring to be self-sufficing, he fell away from Him who truly suffices him. Accordingly, this wicked desire which prompts man to please himself as if he were himself light, and which thus turns him away from that light by which, had he followed it, he would himself have become light,this wicked desire, I say, already secretly existed in him, and the open sin was but its consequence. For that is true which is written, "Pride goeth before destruction, and before honour is humility;"[97] that is to say, secret ruin precedes open ruin, while the former is not counted ruin. For who counts exaltation[Pg 28] ruin, though no sooner is the Highest forsaken than a fall is begun? But who does not recognise it as ruin, when there occurs an evident and indubitable transgression of the commandment? And consequently, God's Prohibition had reference to such an act as, when committed, could not be defended on any pretence of doing what was righteous.[98] And I make bold to say that it is useful for the proud to fall into an open and indisputable transgression, and so displease themselves, as already, by pleasing themselves, they had fallen. For Peter was in a healthier condition when he wept and was dissatisfied with himself, than when he boldly presumed and satisfied himself. And this is averred by the sacred Psalmist when he says, "Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek Thy name, O Lord;"[99] that is, that they who have pleased themselves in seeking their own glory may be pleased and satisfied with Thee in seeking Thy glory.   14. Of the pride in the sin, which was worse than the sin itself.   --   Lust requires for its consummation darkness and secrecy; and this not only when unlawful intercourse is desired, but even such fornication as the earthly city has legalized. Where there is no fear of punishment, these permitted pleasures still shrink from the public eye. Even where provision is made for this lust, secrecy also is provided; and while lust found it easy to remove the Prohibitions of law, shamelessness found it impossible to lay aside the veil of retirement. For even shameless men call this shameful; and though they love the pleasure, dare not display it. What! does not even conjugal intercourse, sanctioned as it is by law for the propagation of children, legitimate and honourable though it be, does it not seek retirement from every eye? Before the bridegroom fondles his bride, does he not exclude the attendants, and even the paranymphs, and such friends as the closest ties have admitted to the bridal chamber? The greatest master of Roman eloquence says, that all right actions wish to be set in the light, i.e. desire to be known. This right action, however, has such a desire to be known, that yet it blushes to be seen. Who does not know what passes between husb and and wife that children may be born? Is it not for this purpose that wives are married with such ceremony? And yet, when this well-understood act is gone about for the procreation of children, not even the children themselves, who may already have been born to them, are suffered to be witnesses. This right action seeks the light, in so far as it seeks to be known, but yet dreads being seen. And why so, if not because that which is by nature fitting and decent is so done as to be accompanied with a shame-begetting penalty of sin?   [Pg 35]

BOOK XIX. - A review of the philosophical opinions regarding the Supreme Good, and a comparison of these opinions with the Christian belief regarding happiness, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   When Porphyry or Hecate praises Christ, and adds that He gave Himself to the Christians as a fatal gift, that they might be involved in error, he exposes, as he thinks, the causes of this error. But before I cite his words to that purpose, I would ask, If Christ did thus give Himself to the Christians to involve them in error, did He do so willingly, or against His will? If willingly, how is He righteous? If against His will, how is He blessed? However, let us hear the causes of this error. "There are," he says, "in a certain place very small earthly spirits, subject to the power of evil demons. The wise men of the Hebrews, among whom was this Jesus, as you have heard from the oracles of Apollo cited above, turned religious persons from these very wicked demons and minor spirits, and taught them rather to worship the celestial gods, and especially to adore God the Father. This," he said, "the gods enjoin; and we have already shown how they admonish the soul to turn to God, and comm and it to worship Him. But the ignorant and the ungodly, who are not destined to receive favours from the gods, nor to know the immortal Jupiter, not listening to the gods and their messages, have turned away from all gods, and have not only refused to hate, but have venerated the prohibited demons. Professing to worship God, they refuse to do those things by which alone God is worshipped. For God, indeed, being the Father of all, is in need of nothing; but for us it is good to adore Him by means of justice, chastity, and other virtues, and thus to make life itself a prayer to Him, by inquiring into and imitating His nature. For inquiry," says he, "purifies and imitation deifies us, by moving us nearer to Him." He is right in so far as he proclaims God the Father, and the conduct by which we should worship Him. Of such precepts the prophetic books of the Hebrews are full, when they praise or blame the life of the saints. But in speaking of the Christians he is in error,[Pg 338] and calumniates them as much as is desired by the demons whom he takes for gods, as if it were difficult for any man to recollect the disgraceful and shameful actions which used to be done in the theatres and temples to please the gods, and to compare with these things what is heard in our churches, and what is offered to the true God, and from this comparison to conclude where character is edified, and where it is ruined. But who but a diabolical spirit has told or suggested to this man so manifest and vain a lie, as that the Christians reverenced rather than hated the demons, whose worship the Hebrews prohibited? But that God, whom the Hebrew sages worshipped, forbids sacrifice to be offered even to the holy angels of heaven and divine powers, whom we, in this our pilgrimage, venerate and love as our most blessed fellow-citizens. For in the law which God gave to His Hebrew people He utters this menace, as in a voice of thunder: "He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed."[659] And that no one might suppose that this Prohibition extends only to the very wicked demons and earthly spirits, whom this philosopher calls very small and inferior,for even these are in the Scripture called gods, not of the Hebrews, but of the nations, as the Septuagint translators have shown in the psalm where it is said, "For all the gods of the nations are demons,"[660]that no one might suppose, I say, that sacrifice to these demons was prohibited, but that sacrifice might be offered to all or some of the celestials, it was immediately added, "save unto the Lord alone."[661] The God of the Hebrews, then, to whom this renowned philosopher bears this signal testimony, gave to His Hebrew people a law, composed in the Hebrew language, and not obscure and unknown, but published now in every nation, and in this law it is written, "He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord alone, he shall be utterly destroyed." What need is there to seek further proofs in the law or the prophets of this same thing? Seek, we need not say, for the passages are neither few nor difficult to find; but what need to collect[Pg 339] and apply to my argument the proofs which are thickly sown and obvious, and by which it appears clear as day that sacrifice may be paid to none but the supreme and true God? Here is one brief but decided, even menacing, and certainly true utterance of that God whom the wisest of our adversaries so highly extol. Let this be listened to, feared, fulfilled, that there may be no disobedient soul cut off. "He that sacrifices," He says, not because He needs anything, but because it behoves us to be His possession. Hence the Psalmist in the Hebrew Scriptures sings, "I have said to the Lord, Thou art my God, for Thou needest not my good."[662] For we ourselves, who are His own city, are His most noble and worthy sacrifice, and it is this mystery we celebrate in our sacrifices, which are well known to the faithful, as we have explained in the preceding books. For through the prophets the oracles of God declared that the sacrifices which the Jews offered as a shadow of that which was to be would cease, and that the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun, would offer one sacrifice. From these oracles, which we now see accomplished, we have made such selections as seemed suitable to our purpose in this work. And therefore, where there is not this righteousness whereby the one supreme God rules the obedient city according to His grace, so that it sacrifices to none but Him, and whereby, in all the citizens of this obedient city, the soul consequently rules the body and reason the vices in the rightful order, so that, as the individual just man, so also the community and people of the just, live by faith, which works by love, that love whereby man loves God as He ought to be loved, and his neighbour as himself,there, I say, there is not an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and by a community of interests. But if there is not this, there is not a people, if our definition be true, and therefore there is no republic; for where there is no people there can be no republic.     24. The definition which must be given of a people and a republic, in order to vindicate the assumption of these titles by the Romans and by other kingdoms.

BOOK XV. - The progress of the earthly and heavenly cities traced by the sacred history, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   As, therefore, the human race, subsequently to the first marriage of the man who was made of dust, and his wife who was made out of his side, required the union of males and females in order that it might multiply, and as there were no human beings except those who had been born of these two, men took their sisters for wives,an act which was as certainly dictated by necessity in these ancient days as afterwards it was condemned by the Prohibitions of religion. For it is very reasonable and just that men, among whom concord is honourable and useful, should be bound together by various relationships; and that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that the various relationships should be distributed among several, and should thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests. "Father" and "father-in-law" are the names of two relationships. When, therefore, a man has one person for his father, another for his father-in-law, friendship extends itself to a larger number. But Adam in his single person was obliged to hold both relations to his sons and daughters, for brothers and sisters were united in marriage. So too Eve his wife was both mother and mother-in-law to her children of both sexes; while, had there been two women, one the mother, the other the mother-in-law, the family affection would have had a wider field. Then the sister herself by becoming a wife sustained in her single person two relationships, which, had they been distributed among individuals, one being sister, and another being wife, the family tie would have embraced a greater number of persons. But there was then no material for effecting this, since there were no human beings but the brothers and sisters born of those two first parents. Therefore, when an abundant population made it possible, men ought to choose for wives women who were not already their sisters; for not only would there then be no[Pg 79] necessity for marrying sisters, but, were it done, it would be most abominable. For if the grandchildren of the first pair, being now able to choose their cousins for wives, married their sisters, then it would no longer be only two but three relationships that were held by one man, while each of these relationships ought to have been held by a separate individual, so as to bind together by family affection a larger number. For one man would in that case be both father, and father-in-law, and uncle[181] to his own children (brother and sister now man and wife); and his wife would be mother, aunt, and mother-in-law to them; and they themselves would be not only brother and sister, and man and wife, but cousins also, being the children of brother and sister. Now, all these relationships, which combined three men into one, would have embraced nine persons had each relationship been held by one individual, so that a man had one person for his sister, another his wife, another his cousin, another his father, another his uncle, another his father-in-law, another his mother, another his aunt, another his mother-in-law; and thus the social bond would not have been tightened to bind a few, but loosened to embrace a larger number of relations.   And we see that, since the human race has increased and multiplied, this is so strictly observed even among the profane worshippers of many and false gods, that though their laws perversely allow a brother to marry his sister,[182] yet custom, with a finer morality, prefers to forego this licence; and though it was quite allowable in the earliest ages of the human race to marry one's sister, it is now abhorred as a thing which no circumstances could justify. For custom has very great power either to attract or to shock human feeling. And in this matter, while it restrains concupiscence within due bounds, the man who neglects and disobeys it is justly branded as abominable. For if it is iniquitous to plough beyond our own boundaries through the greed of gain, is it not much more iniquitous to transgress the recognised boundaries of morals through sexual lust? And with regard to marriage in the next degree of consanguinity, marriage between[Pg 80] cousins, we have observed that in our own time the customary morality has prevented this from being frequent, though the law allows it. It was not prohibited by divine law, nor as yet had human law prohibited it; nevertheless, though legitimate, people shrank from it, because it lay so close to what was illegitimate, and in marrying a cousin seemed almost to marry a sister,for cousins are so closely related that they are called brothers and sisters,[183] and are almost really so. But the ancient fathers, fearing that near relationship might gradually in the course of generations diverge, and become distant relationship, or cease to be relationship at all, religiously endeavoured to limit it by the bond of marriage before it became distant, and thus, as it were, to call it back when it was escaping them. And on this account, even when the world was full of people, though they did not choose wives from among their sisters or half-sisters, yet they preferred them to be of the same stock as themselves. But who doubts that the modern Prohibition of the marriage even of cousins is the more seemly regulation,not merely on account of the reason we have been urging, the multiplying of relationships, so that one person might not absorb two, which might be distributed to two persons, and so increase the number of people bound together as a family, but also because there is in human nature I know not what natural and praiseworthy shamefacedness which restrains us from desiring that connection which, though for propagation, is yet lustful, and which even conjugal modesty blushes over, with any one to whom consanguinity bids us render respect?   The sexual intercourse of man and woman, then, is in the case of mortals a kind of seed-bed of the city; but while the earthly city needs for its population only generation, the heavenly needs also regeneration to rid it of the taint of generation. Whether before the deluge there was any bodily or visible sign of regeneration, such as was afterwards enjoined upon Abraham when he was circumcised, or what kind of sign it was, the sacred history does not inform us. But it does inform us that even these earliest of mankind sacrificed[Pg 81] to God, as appeared also in the case of the two first brothers; Noah, too, is said to have offered sacrifices to God when he had come forth from the ark after the deluge. And concerning this subject we have already said in the foregoing books that the devils arrogate to themselves divinity, and require sacrifice that they may be esteemed gods, and delight in these honours on no other account than this, because they know that true sacrifice is due to the true God.

BOOK XXI. - Of the eternal punishment of the wicked in hell, and of the various objections urged against it, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   But such is God's mercy towards the vessels of mercy which He has prepared for glory, that even the first age of man, that is, infancy, which submits without any resistance to the flesh, and the second age, which is called boyhood, and which has not yet understanding enough to undertake this warfare, and therefore yields to almost every vicious pleasure[Pg 443] (because though this age has the power of speech,[886] and may therefore seem to have passed infancy, the mind is still too weak to comprehend the commandment), yet if either of these ages has received the sacraments of the Mediator, then, although the present life be immediately brought to an end, the child, having been translated from the power of darkness to the kingdom of Christ, shall not only be saved from eternal punishments, but shall not even suffer purgatorial torments after death. For spiritual regeneration of itself suffices to prevent any evil consequences resulting after death from the connection with death which carnal generation forms.[887] But when we reach that age which can now comprehend the commandment, and submit to the dominion of law, we must declare war upon vices, and wage this war keenly, lest we be landed in damnable sins. And if vices have not gathered strength, by habitual victory they are more easily overcome and subdued; but if they have been used to conquer and rule, it is only with difficulty and labour they are mastered. And indeed this victory cannot be sincerely and truly gained but by delighting in true righteousness, and it is faith in Christ that gives this. For if the law be present with its command, and the Spirit be absent with His help, the presence of the Prohibition serves only to increase the desire to sin, and adds the guilt of transgression. Sometimes, indeed, patent vices are overcome by other and hidden vices, which are reckoned virtues, though pride and a kind of ruinous self-sufficiency are their informing principles. Accordingly vices are then only to be considered overcome when they are conquered by the love of God, which God Himself alone gives, and which He gives only through the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who became a partaker of our mortality that He might make us partakers of His divinity. But few indeed are they who are so happy as to have passed their youth without committing any damnable sins, either by dissolute or violent conduct, or by following some godless and unlawful opinions, but have subdued by their greatness of soul everything in them which could make them the slaves of carnal pleasures. The greater number having first become[Pg 444] transgressors of the law that they have received, and having allowed vice to have the ascendency in them, then flee to grace for help, and so, by a penitence more bitter, and a struggle more violent than it would otherwise have been, they subdue the soul to God, and thus give it its lawful authority over the flesh, and become victors. Whoever, therefore, desires to escape eternal punishment, let him not only be baptized, but also justified in Christ, and so let him in truth pass from the devil to Christ. And let him not fancy that there are any purgatorial pains except before that final and dreadful judgment. We must not, however, deny that even the eternal fire will be proportioned to the deserts of the wicked, so that to some it will be more, and to others less painful, whether this result be accomplished by a variation in the temperature of the fire itself, graduated according to every one's merit, or whether it be that the heat remains the same, but that all do not feel it with equal intensity of torment.   17. Of those who fancy that no men shall be punished eternally.

COSA - BOOK VI, #The Confessions of Saint Augustine, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity   practice, rather than discuss his Prohibition. For wine-bibbing did not   lay siege to her spirit, nor did love of wine provoke her to hatred of

ENNEAD 02.09 - Against the Gnostics; or, That the Creator and the World are Not Evil., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity   have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no Prohibition   against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who

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Liber 71 - The Voice of the Silence - The Two Paths - The Seven Portals, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction    practices used by those in "training." The Prohibitions, relatively    valuable, were exalted into general rules. To "break training" is not a

r1914 04 08, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    Ritam of trikaldrishti is still successful[ly] resisted, although it is more frequent than it was when the forward movement was suspended. It is, however, progressively purifying itself of error. Aishwarya & ishita are also becoming more & more effective & exultantly effective, in accordance with the mornings lipi; for the bar or Prohibition against exultation is now withdrawn, because harsha of the lower mind (joy of fulfilled desire) is now being replaced by chanda saumyata of the anandamaya observation in the desireless sakshi. Formerly, will always created immediately a reactive opposition which brought about, and more often than not with either immediate or eventual effectuality, different or reverse movements. Now this principle of resistance is less frequent, less confident or not at all confident, tired and seldom eventually effective except in the pure physical object or in things of the karma & even there its power is slowly but steadily waning. The triumphant immediate force with which it acted, is almost dead; when a ghost of it revives, it is almost immediately tired, & if it persists, persists with difficulty.    The Anandamaya Lilamaya Saguna is now being established in the conscious observation of persons & objects, although the Anandamaya Saguna is the usual bodha & there is a tendency of relapse to the mere Jnanamaya Saguna, but this is comparatively rare. Anandamaya Saguna tends to be the assured level (sanu) of the Brahmadarshana from which there is a steady tendency to rise to the Lilamaya. Formerly the sense of the Lilamaya Krishna or Narayana used to blot out the Jiva and, also, it used to be isolated without the background & continent of the Sarva Brahman or the pervasive content of the Sarva Ananta Jnana Brahman,it was divine Anandamaya personality concentrated in a single individual being. All the suspensions, relapses & retardations of the Brahmadarshana during the last few years have had for their object the removal of these & other defects and the development & harmonious unification of its various aspects, Saguna & Nirguna, Purusha-Prakriti, Ishwara-Shakti, Prajna-Hiranya-Virat, Sarva with Ananta, Sarva-Ananta with Jnana, Sarva-Ananta-Jnana with Ananda etc. The unification seems now to be approaching completion.

r1914 11 28, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    There is this morning a struggle between the Siddhi which insists on the continuance of the Ananda & the Prohibition of Siddhi which insists that after a day of manifestation should follow a day of reserve.    The Ananda is there in the mentality of the body, held back from the outward shell, but affecting it and occasionally breaking out in distinctness at a point.

r1914 12 10, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    It is noticeable that defect of anima in the back & legs obeyed the Prohibition of the Tapas and that the after reaction is being reduced.    The sense of exhaustion after effort is being expelled from the physical consciousness.

r1920 02 24, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    Today strong attack of besieging intuivity on all ideal members. In lipi this results in persistence of intuitive ideal lipi representing the intuitive mentality in the ideality, but not itself mental in kind. An insufficient speech and suggestion is its limitation; it is true in itself, but so expressed as to mislead the mind. It is rejected in favour of the intuitive revelatory or at lowest revelatory [intuitive],1 representative and interpretative lipi, but still recurs sometimes in spite of Prohibition.    In thought-siddhi the same process is taking place, but the recurrence of lower forms of ideal speech is strong and occasionally there is the half idealised mental suggestion from outside. Nevertheless lower ideal forms are now banned by the law of the Shakti.

Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism   happened to catch fish in a pond of the master's garden-house in contravention of his strict Prohibition.   As ill-luck would have it, the master came upon the scene just then and saw what his dishonest steward

Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   STRANGER: Do you observe that our scepticism has carried us beyond the range of Parmenides' Prohibition?   THEAETETUS: In what?

Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i   They that immerse themselves in the ocean of His utterances should at all times have the utmost regard for the divinely-revealed ordinances and Prohibitions. Indeed His ordinances constitute the mightiest stronghold for the protection of the world and the safeguarding of its peoples--a light upon those who acknowledge and recognize the truth, and a fire unto such as turn away and deny.   The second Tajallí   --   O thou who hast set thy face towards the Realm on High and hast quaffed My sealed wine from the hand of bounteousness! Know thou that the term 'Infallibility' hath numerous meanings and diverse stations. In one sense it is applicable to the One Whom God hath made immune from error. Similarly it is applied to every soul whom God hath guarded against sin, transgression, rebellion, impiety, disbelief and the like. However, the Most Great Infallibility is confined to the One Whose station is immeasurably exalted beyond ordinances or Prohibitions and is sanctified from errors and omissions. Indeed He is a Light which is not followed by darkness and a Truth not overtaken by error. Were He to pronounce water to be wine or heaven to be earth or light to be fire, He speaketh the truth and no doubt would there be about it; and unto no one is given the right to question His authority or to say why or wherefore. Whosoever raiseth objections will be numbered with the froward in the Book of God, the Lord of the worlds. 'Verily He shall not be asked of His doings but all others shall be asked of their doings.' 1 He is come from the invisible heaven, bearing the banner 'He doeth whatsoever He willeth' and is accompanied by hosts of power and authority while it is the duty of all besides Him to strictly observe whatever laws and ordinances have been enjoined upon them, and should anyone deviate therefrom, even to the extent of a hair's breadth, his work would be brought to naught. 1. cf. Qur'án 21:23. [Most Great Infallibility] The Kitab-i-Aqdas, ¶47; The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 1 p. 133; vol. 2 p. 262; vol. 3 p. 300; vol. 4 p. 149   Consider thou and call to mind the time when Muhammad appeared. He said, and His word is the truth: 'Pilgrimage to the House 1 is a service due to God.' 2 And likewise are the daily prayer, fasting, and the laws which shone forth above the horizon of the Book of God, the Lord of the World and the true Educator of the peoples and kindreds of the earth. It is incumbent upon everyone to obey Him in whatsoever God hath ordained; and whosoever denieth Him hath disbelieved in God, in His verses, in His Messengers and in His Books. Were He to pronounce right to be wrong or denial to be belief, He speaketh the truth as bidden by God. This is a station wherein sins or trespasses neither exist nor are mentioned. Consider thou the blessed, the divinely revealed verse in which pilgrimage to the House is enjoined upon everyone. It devolved upon those invested with authority after Him 3 to observe whatever had been prescribed unto them in the Book. Unto no one is given the right to deviate from the laws and ordinances of God. Whoso deviateth therefrom is reckoned with the trespassers in the Book of God, the Lord of the Mighty Throne. 1. Mecca.   --   As to Paradise: It is a reality and there can be no doubt about it, and now in this world it is realized through love of Me and My good-pleasure. Whosoever attaineth unto it God will aid him in this world below, and after death He will enable him to gain admittance into Paradise whose vastness is as that of heaven and earth. Therein the Maids of glory and holiness will wait upon him in the daytime and in the night season, while the day-star of the unfading beauty of his Lord will at all times shed its radiance upon him and he will shine so brightly that no one shall bear to gaze at him. Such is the dispensation of Providence, yet the people are shut out by a grievous veil. Likewise apprehend thou the nature of hell-fire and be of them that truly believe. For every act performed there shall be a recompense according to the estimate of God, and unto this the very ordinances and Prohibitions prescribed by the Almighty amply bear witness. For surely if deeds were not rewarded and yielded no fruit, then the Cause of God--exalted is He--would prove futile. Immeasurably high is He exalted above such blasphemies! However, unto them that are rid of all attachments a deed is, verily, its own reward. Were We to enlarge upon this theme numerous Tablets would need to be written. ["For every act performed..."] The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 4 p. 211   I swear by the righteousness of the One true God! The Pen is unable to move by reason of that which hath befallen its Lord, and it weepeth sore, and so do I weep, and likewise weepeth the eye of Him Who is the Essence of Grandeur behind the Tabernacle of Names while seated on the Throne of His glorious Name.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   Owing to Prohibition, there is a substantial loss of revenue. He told the merchants that if they didn't donate, new taxes would have to be imposed.   SRI AUROBINDO: It is better not to destroy the capitalists as the Socialists want.   --   SRI AUROBINDO: But application of force in any form is violence. Prohibition   by force is also violence. Has he ever thought how he will rule by non-violence?   --   DR. MANILAL: Will the Government go against the Congress Ministry reforms? For example, Prohibition?   SRI AUROBINDO: Not likely, unless India as a whole wants it to go.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen   SATYENDRA: After a long time the judgment on the Bombay Prohibition   case has come out.   --   because of the opportunity violence would give that they joined the movement. And then he supports Prohibition. Prohibition under compulsion is violence. There is no compulsion unless there is violence.   PURANI: He says a child has to be forced to do good things and that this

The Book of Certitude - P1, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i   It is unquestionable that in every succeeding Revelation the "sun" and "moon" of the teachings, laws, commandments, and Prohibitions which have been established in the preceding Dispensation, and which have overshadowed the people of that age, become darkened, that is, are exhausted, and cease to exert their influence. Consider now, had the people of the Gospel recognized the meaning of the symbolic terms "sun" and "moon," had they sought, unlike the froward and perverse, enlightenment from Him Who is the Revealer of divine knowledge, they would have surely comprehended the purpose of these terms, and would not have become afflicted and oppressed by the darkness of their selfish desires. Yea, but since they have failed to acquire true knowledge from its very Source, they have perished in the perilous vale of waywardness and misbelief. They still have not awakened to perceive that all the signs foretold have been made manifest, that the promised Sun hath risen above the horizon of divine Revelation, and that the "sun" and "moon" of the teachings, the laws, and learning of a former Dispensation have darkened and set. ["It is unquestionable..."] The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh vol. 1 p. 168   42

The Coming Race Contents, #The Coming Race, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga   tions and Prohibitions ; all which signifies or   comes to signify that every individual is not

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Alcatraz ::: TV-14 | 1h | Action, Crime, Drama | TV Series (2012) In 1963, all the prisoners and guards mysteriously disappear from Alcatraz. In the present day, they resurface and a secret agency are tasked with re-capturing them. Creators: Steven Lilien, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Bryan Wynbrandt Stars:

Devils on the Doorstep (2000) ::: 8.2/10 -- Guizi lai le (original title) -- Devils on the Doorstep Poster During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time... S Director: Wen Jiang Writers: Wen Jiang (screenplay), Wen Jiang (story) | 7 more credits

Goodbye Bafana (2007) ::: 7.1/10 -- R | 1h 58min | Biography, Drama, History | 11 April 2007 (France) -- Goodbye Bafana is the true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years. The prisoner's name was Nelson Mandela. Director: Bille August Writers: Bille August, Bob Graham (book) | 3 more credits Stars:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) ::: 7.9/10 -- PG | 2h 22min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy | 4 June 2004 (USA) -- Harry Potter, Ron and Hermione return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for their third year of study, where they delve into the mystery surrounding an escaped prisoner who poses a dangerous threat to the young wizard. Director: Alfonso Cuarn Writers:

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Nanbaka 2 -- -- Satelight -- 12 eps -- Web manga -- Action Comedy Drama -- Nanbaka 2 Nanbaka 2 -- The second part of Nanbaka. The prisoners and their guards continue their comfortable lives at Nanba Prison. However, from the shadows emerges a new threat: Enki Gokuu, a person from Samon's past, who has mysterious goals of his own. -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- ONA - Jan 4, 2017 -- 98,817 7.50

Nanbaka 2 -- -- Satelight -- 12 eps -- Web manga -- Action Comedy Drama -- Nanbaka 2 Nanbaka 2 -- The second part of Nanbaka. The prisoners and their guards continue their comfortable lives at Nanba Prison. However, from the shadows emerges a new threat: Enki Gokuu, a person from Samon's past, who has mysterious goals of his own. -- ONA - Jan 4, 2017 -- 98,817 7.50

Norageki! -- -- Sunrise -- 1 ep -- Original -- Mystery Sci-Fi Space -- Norageki! Norageki! -- In an isolated prison, there are only four prisoners and a cat. One day, a power outage opens all the locks and all of the prisoners are released. However, all of the guards are nowhere to be seen and there are no exits. An extraordinary event occurs in response to an old man's strange behavior. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- OVA - Jan 22, 2011 -- 9,499 6.16

Seikai no Senki II -- -- Sunrise -- 10 eps -- Light novel -- Action Military Romance Sci-Fi Space -- Seikai no Senki II Seikai no Senki II -- Due to a lack of ambassadors for the recently-conquered worlds the rapidly advancing fleet of the Bebaus brothers leave behind, Lafiel is appointed Territorial Ambassador of the planet Lobnas II. Upon arriving to the planet Jinto and Lafiel discover that the planet was used by the United Mankind as a prison planet and now has a million prisoners on the only inhabited island. The prisoners are parted in three blocks. The western where women are housed, the eastern belongs to the men and the central is mixed under the restriction that all prisoners living there are sterilized. The women in the western sector want to emigrate from the planet of fear for the men and when they do the men in the east rebel, overthrowing the guards and capturing Jinto to try to stop the emigration of the women. At the same time an enemy fleet heads toward the system forcing Lafiel to abandon Jinto. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment, Funimation -- TV - Jul 11, 2001 -- 20,527 7.83

Arrival (The Prisoner)

Chapter 6: The Prisoner

Checkmate (The Prisoner)

Dance of the Dead (The Prisoner)

Fall Out (The Prisoner)

Free for All (The Prisoner)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (film)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (soundtrack)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (video game)

James Carter and the Prisoners

List of The Prisoner episodes

Many Happy Returns (The Prisoner)

Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25

Once Upon a Time (The Prisoner)

Release the Prisoners to Spring

Rover (The Prisoner)

The Prisoner

The Prisoner's Dilemma (Prison Break)

The Prisoner's Song

The Prisoner (1920 film)

The Prisoner (1949 film)

The Prisoner (2009 miniseries)

The Prisoner of Benda

The Prisoner of Chteau d'If

The Prisoner of Chillon

The Prisoner of Corbal

The Prisoner of Dahomey

The Prisoner of Heaven

The Prisoner of Santa Cruz

The Prisoner of Second Avenue

The Prisoner of St. Petersburg

The Prisoner of the Caucasus

The Prisoner of the Iron Mask

The Prisoner of the Maharaja

The Prisoner of Zenda

The Prisoner of Zenda (1979 film)

The Prisoner of Zenda (disambiguation)

The Prisoners

The Prisoners of Shanghai

The Prisoners (The Walking Dead)

The Prisoner (video game)

The Village (The Prisoner)