Philosophical speechI firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.William JamesPragmatism · 1906★ 6.0
SociologyThe men, women, and children who compose a society at any time are the unconscious depositaries and transmitters of the mores. They inherited them without knowing it; they are molding them unconsciously; they will transmit them involuntarily. The people cannot make the mores. They are made by them.William Graham SumnerFolkways · 1906★ 5.0
SociologyA differentiation arises between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups, out-groups.William Graham SumnerFolkways · 1906★ 4.3
Philosophical speechThe philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.William JamesPragmatism · 1906★ 4.3
A man who denies to other men equality of rights is hardly worthy of freedom; but I would give even to him all the rights which I claim for myself.Abraham Lincoln1906★ 3.8
Philosophical speechI myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.William JamesPragmatism · 1906★ 3.5
SociologyThe mores come down to us from the past. Each individual is born into them as he is born into the atmosphere, and he does not reflect on them, or criticise them any more than a baby analyzes the atmosphere before he begins to breathe it.William Graham SumnerFolkways · 1906★ 3.4
SociologyIf we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.William Graham SumnerFolkways · 1906★ 3.4
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.Mark Twain1906★ 2.0
SpeechThe men with the muckrakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them...if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck their power of usefulness is gone.Theodore Roosevelt1906★ 1.9
To men a man is but a mind. Who cares What face he carries or what form he wears? But woman's body is the woman.Ambrose Bierce1906★ 1.9
EssayThe photographer is like the cod which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.George Bernard Shaw1906★ 1.9
Short storyIf men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.O. Henry1906★ 1.9
It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.G.K. Chesterton1906★ 1.8
Sociology · Historical literatureWhere torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.William Graham Sumner1906★ 1.8
LetterMost people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.William James1906★ 1.8
LetterThe moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That-with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success-is our national disease.William James1906★ 1.8
SociologyEthnocentrism is the...view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it...Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.William Graham SumnerFolkways · 1906★ 1.7
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