He was the more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations. He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience. On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
Henry AdamsRelated topics
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...that Chancellor of the Exchequer is the very man who comes down to corrupt whatever there is of financial virtue in us, and to instil into our minds those seductive and poisonous ideas that it does not, after all, matter very much if there is a deficit, and that it is extremely disagreeable when commerce is not in the most flourishing state to call upon the people to pay. Was that the practice of Sir Robert Peel? ... he came to Parliament and stood at his place in the House of Commons, pointed out the figures as they stood, and said to them-I ask you, will you resort to the "miserable expedient" of tolerating deficit, and of making provision by loans from year to year? That which he denounced as the "miserable expedient" has become the standing law, has become almost the financial gospel of the Government that is now in power.
William Ewart Gladstone
An extreme, unconditional human yearning was expressed for the first time by Nietzsche independently of moral goals or of serving God. ... Ardor that doesn't address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. ... If we stop looking at states of ardor as simply preliminary to other and subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightning, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or the growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consuming can't even be comprehended. ... I'll have to face the same difficulties as Nietzsche-putting God and the good behind him, though all ablaze with the ardor possessed by those who lay down their lives for God or the good. ... I'll admit that moral investigations that aim to surpass the good lead first of all to disorder.
Georges Bataille
To conclude, if we call light, those rays which illuminate objects, and radiant heat, those which heat bodies, it may be inquired whether light be essentially different from radiant heat? In answer to which I would suggest that we are not allowed, by the rules of philosophizing, to admit two different causes to explain certain effects, if they may be accounted for by one. ...If this be a true account of the solar heat, for the support of which I appeal to my experiments, it remains only for us to admit that such of the rays of the sun as have the refrangibility of those which are contained in the prismatic spectrum, by the construction of the organs of sight, are admitted under the appearance of light and colors, and that the rest, being stopped in the coats and humors of the eye, act on them, as they are known to do on all the other parts of our body, by occasioning a sensation of heat.
William Herschel
We shall almost be hooted down in the House, I expect, for the Tories are for war, partly because the Government has been supposed to be for peace. And if war begins, then nine-tenths of the men on our side will back the Government and shout even more vociferously than the Tories. Losing a Reform Bill and gaining a war. I don't see how we could be worse placed. Though the end may show that we are now right, yet the end is not yet, and in the meantime we shall have much to suffer and much to despond about. How men can prefer the certain and enormous evils of a war, to the dim and vague prospect of remote injury from Russian aggrandisement, is beyond my understanding. The nation seems little wiser than in 1793 and we may soon be as unpopular as Fox was, and yet be as much right as he was. I feel rather sick of public life, and indeed of the follies of my country.
John Bright
Hamilton was not only an Irishman, but Irish: and this with curious oppositions of character. He was a non-combatant: there was too much kindness in his disposition to allow any fight to show itself. Impulsive and enthusiastic, with strong opinions and new views, he was never engaged in a scientific controversy... William Rowan Hamilton's preservative was his dread of wounding the feelings of others. In his youth, "Defender of the Absent" was his nickname. ...He had a morbid fear of being a plagiarist; and the letters which he wrote to those who had treated like subjects with himself sometimes contained curious and far-fetched misgivings about his own priority. But, with all this, there was a touch of the national temperament in him... an Irishman who never gets into a row may give quick but quiet symptoms of opposition of opinion, and of what, were it more than a rudiment, would be called pugnacity.
William Rowan Hamilton