Monday, January 26, 2009

rogues and vagabonds, John Ruskin 1883

"If you examine in the the history of rogues, you will find that they are as truly manufactured articles as anything else, and it is just because our present system of political economy gives so large a stimulus to that manufacture that you may know it to be a false one. We had better seek for a system which will develop honest men than for one which will deal cunningly with vagabonds. Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons." --John Ruskin

"A leading fact in human progress is that every science is evolved out of its corresponding art. It results from the necessity we are under, both individually and as a race, of reaching the abstract by way of the concrete, that there must be practice and an accruing experience with its empirical generalizations before there can be science." --"Education," Herbert Spencer 1883

"It is not equitable that what one man hath done for the public should discharge another of what it has a right to expect from him; For one, standing indebted in himself to society, cannot substitute anything in the room of his personal service. The father cannot transmit to his son the right of being useless to his fellow-creatures.
...The man who earns not his subsistence, but eats the bread of idleness is no better than a thief... To labor, then is the indispensable duty of social or political man. Rich or poor, strong or weak, every idle citizen is a knave." --Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1767

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