WIST

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, ch. 1 (1852)

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink:
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by and by,
Or any other reason why.

Henry Aldrich (1647-1710) English theologian and philosopher
“If all be true that I do think”, l. 1-5

Good humor and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over.

Alexander Smith (1830-1867) Scottish poet
Dreamthorp, ch. 12 (1863)

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

John Updike (1932-2009) American writer
Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, ch. 6 (1989)

All men in whose character there is not an element of hardened baseness must admit the need in our public life of those qualities which we somewhat vaguely group together when we speak of “reform,” and all men of sound mind must also admit the need of efficiency. There are, of course, men of such low moral type, or of such ingrained cynicism, that they do not believe in the possibility of making anything better, or do not care to see things better. There are also men who are slightly disordered mentally, or who are cursed with a moral twist which makes them champion reforms less from a desire to do good to others than as a kind of tribute to their own righteousness, for the sake of emphasizing their own superiority. From neither of these classes can we get any real help in the unending struggle for righteousness. There remains the great body of the people, including the entire body of those through whom the salvation of the people must ultimately be worked out. All these men combine or seek to combine in varying degrees the quality of striving after the ideal, that is, the quality which makes men reformers, and the quality of so striving through practical methods — the quality which makes men efficient. Both qualities are absolutely essential. The absence of either makes the presence of the other worthless or worse.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) US President (1901-1909)
“Latitude and Longitude Among Reformers,” The Century (Jun 1900)
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