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"The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity."
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"The Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness."

"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."

"This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."

"Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner."

"When our gospel promotes too much miracles, we are telling people that it is normal for them to expect something from nothing."

"Non Violence and Religion: Both designed to keep the oppressed from murdering their oppressors."

"Miracle centered gospels cripple the present and generations to come."

"What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly."
Explore more quotes by Henry David Thoreau

"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."

"I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while."

"I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things."

"Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent."
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