R. H. Tawney - Men Quotes

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To take usury is contrary to Scripture; it is contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labour; it is to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of wicked men.

R. H. Tawney
The organization of education on lines of class, which, though qualified in the last twenty years, has characterized the English system of public education since its very inception, has been at once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the control of the lives of the mass of men and women by a privileged minority. The very assumption on which it is based, that all that the child of the workers needs is "elementary education" — as though the mass of the people, like anthropoid apes, had fewer convolutions in their brains than the rich — is in itself a piece of insolence.

R. H. Tawney
Defined by its purpose, its [education's] main aim is not to impart the specialized technique of any particular trade or profession, but to develop the faculties which, because they are the attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class or profession of men, and to build up the interests which, while they may become the basis of specialization at a later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility for any particular vocation, because they are the condition of a rational and responsible life in society.

R. H. Tawney
Democracy a society where ordinary men exercise initiative. Dreadful respect for superiors. Mental enlargement…Real foe to be overcome…fact that large section of the public like plutocratic government, and are easily gullible. How shake them!

R. H. Tawney
Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself.

R. H. Tawney
Militarism…is fetish worship. It is the prostration of men's souls and the laceration of their bodies to appease an idol.

R. H. Tawney
When men have gone so far as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that someone broke them.

R. H. Tawney