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| Frederick Douglass |
“We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world … In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.”
— Frederick Douglass, 1869
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family.
--Frederick Douglass
Increasingly it was seen that Creation was only the most grand form of a variety of mechanical devices – machines – that had recently captured western imagination. From a world of qualities what was emerging was one of quantity.
The decline to shopping-mall and fast-food aesthetics is not entirely due to economic and psychological depression or to the prescription drugs we take to numb us down. Tastelessness derives also from the neglect of the deeper soul, which has aesthetic needs, apart from physical satisfaction. The soul shrivels without images and sensations of beauty.
The trend in ecosystems is from the relatively simple and wasteful pioneer stage characterized by competition toward the more complex and cooperative climax stage distinguished by mutualism.
The trend in ecosystems is from the relatively simple and wasteful pioneer stage characterized by competition toward the more complex and cooperative climax stage distinguished by mutualism.
America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.
