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"The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard."
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"Miracles focused gospel teaches us to be selfish and egocentric."
"Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!"
"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."
"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
"If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one."
"Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity."
"God of blind believers is most likely to be cock-eyed."
Explore more quotes by Henry David Thoreau
"If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things."
"Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces."
"It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes."
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."
"No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well."
"There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be."
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