William Winwood Reade Quotes
Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.
A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.
As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.
What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?
Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.
One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.
It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.
If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.
It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm.
One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man...It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.
Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.
The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.
