William Ralph Inge - Outspoken Essays (1919)

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It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

William Ralph Inge
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

William Ralph Inge
If... an outbreak of cholera might be caused either by an infected water supply or by the blasphemies of an infidel mayor, medical research would be in confusion.

William Ralph Inge
No scientific discovery is without its religious and moral implications.

William Ralph Inge
Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.

William Ralph Inge
But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.

William Ralph Inge
The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or another. And even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is habitable.

William Ralph Inge
In imperialism nothing fails like success. If the conqueror oppresses his subjects, they will become fanatical patriots, and sooner or later have their revenge; if he treats them well, and governs them for their good, they will multiply faster than their rulers, till they claim their independence.

William Ralph Inge
The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and the passive.

William Ralph Inge
Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.

William Ralph Inge
Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.

William Ralph Inge
It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.

William Ralph Inge
Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

William Ralph Inge
The nations which have put mankind and posterity most in their debt have been small states—Israel, Athens, Florence, Elizabethan England.

William Ralph Inge
The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.

William Ralph Inge
I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.

William Ralph Inge
Beneath the dingy uniformity of international fashions in dress, man remains what he has always been; a splendid fighting animal, a self-sacrificing hero, and a blood thirsty savage.

William Ralph Inge
Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

William Ralph Inge