But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.
Quotations by:
Wylie, Philip Gordon
Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.
The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers –myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems -— have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.
Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business — little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light.
The economic system of theft has one great disadvantage: it works only while there is something to steal.
Philip Wylie (1902-1971) American author
Generation of Vipers, ch. 1 (1942)
Ignorance is not bliss — it’s oblivion.
Philip Wylie (1902-1971) American author
The Generation of Vipers
What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!