Rudyard Kipling

“ I ask this, because talking to people who for any cause have been denied these experiences is like trying to tell a neutral of our life between 1914 and 1918.
Independence means, “Let every herring hang by its own head.” It signifies the blessed state of hanging on to as few persons and things as possible; and it leads up to the singular privilege of a man owning himself. ”

“ I have already touched on the privilege of being broken by birth, Custom, precept and example to doing without things. This is where the sons of the small houses who have borne the yoke in their youth hold a cumulative advantage over those who have been accustomed to life with broad margins. Such men can and do accommodate themselves to straitened circumstances at a pinch, and for an object; but they are as aware of their efforts afterwards as an untrained man is aware of his muscles on the second morning of a walking tour ”

“ The past few years have so immensely quickened and emphasized all means of communication, visible and invisible, in every direction that our world—which is only another name for the Tribe—is not merely "too much with us," but moves, shouts, and moralizes about our path and our bed, through every hour of our days and nights. ”

“ The independence which was a "glorious privilege" in Robert Burns's day, is now more difficult to achieve than when one had merely to overcome a few material obstacles, and the rest followed almost automatically. Nowadays, to own oneself in any decent measure, one has to run counter to a gospel, and to fight against its atmosphere; and an atmosphere, as long as it can be kept up, is rather cloying. ”

“ For the eternal question still is whether the profit of any concession that a man makes to his Tribe, against the Light that is in him, outweighs or justifies his disregard of that Light. A man may apply his independence to what is called worldly advantage, and discover too late that he laboriously has made himself dependent on a mass of external conditions, for the maintenance of which he has sacrificed himself. ”

“ It is only natural, then, that individuals who first practised this apparently insane and purposeless exercise came later to bulk in the legends of their Tribe as demigods, who went forth and bearded the gods themselves for gifts—for fire, wisdom, or knowledge of the arts.
But one thing that stands outside exaggeration or belittlement—through all changes in shapes of things and the sounds of words—is the bidding, the guidance, that drives a man to own himself and upholds him through his steps on that road. ”

“ Conceive his pride, his awestricken admiration of himself, when he saw that, by mere word of mouth, he could send his simpler companions shinning up trees in search of fruit which he knew was not there, and when they descended, empty and angry, he could persuade them that they, and not he, were in fault, and could despatch them hopefully up another tree! Can you blame the Creature for thinking himself a god? ”

“ Now the amount of Truth open to Mankind has always been limited. Substantially, it comes to no more than the axiom quoted by the Fool in Twelfth Night, on the authority of the witty Hermit of Prague, "That that is, is." Conversely, "That that is not, isn't." But it is just this Truth which Man most bitterly resents being brought to his notice. He will do, suffer, and permit anything rather than acknowledge it. He desires that the waters which he has digged and canalized should run uphill by themselves when it suits him. ”

“ Now, what in this World, or the next, can the World, or any Tribe in it, do with or to people of this temper? Bribe them by good dinners to take larger views on life? They would probably see their hosts under the table first and argue their heads off afterwards. Offer 'em money to shed a conviction or two? A man doesn't lightly sell what he has paid for with his hide. ”

“ Among the generations that have preceded you at this University were men of your own blood—many and many—who did their work on the traditional sack of peasemeal or oatmeal behind the door—weighed out and measured with their own hands against the cravings of their natural appetites. ”

“ Free, moreover, to work without physical molestation of yourself or your family as long and as closely as you please—free to exploit your own powers and your own health to the uttermost for your own ends. ”

“ Because if a man has not his rations in advance, for any excursion of any kind that he proposes to himself, he must stay with his Tribe. He may swear at it aloud or under his breath. He may tell himself and his friends what splendid things he would do were he his own master, but as his Tribe goes so must he go—for his belly’s sake. When and as it lies, so must he lie. Its people must be his people, and its God must be his God. Some men may accept this dispensation ”

“ That bidding comes, direct as a beam of light, from that Past when man had grown into his present shape, which Past, could we question it, would probably refer us to a Past immeasurably remoter still, whose Creature, not yet Man, felt within him that it was not well for him to jackal round another brute’s kill, even if he went hungry for a while. ”

“ The initial payments on the policy of one’s independence, then, must be financed, by no means for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith towards oneself, primarily out of the drinks that one does not too continuously take; the maidens in whom one does not too extravagantly rejoice; the entertainments that one does not too systematically attend or conduct; the transportation one does not too magnificently employ; the bets one does not too generally place, and the objects of beauty and desire that one does not too generously buy. ”

“ No one knows how long it took to divide the human line of ascent from that of the larger apes; but during that cleavage there may have been an epoch when Man lay under the affliction of something very like human thought before he could have reached the relief of speech. It is indeed conceivable that in that long inarticulate agony he may have traversed—dumb—the full round of personal experience and emotion. And when, at last, speech was born, what was the first practical use Man made of it? ”

“ Not once upon a time, but at many different times in different places and ages, it came over some one Primitive Man that he desired, above everything, to escape for a while from the sight and sound and the smell of his Tribe. ”

“ It is not such a far cry from that Creature, howling over his empty stomach in the dark, to the Heir of all the Ages counting over his coppers in front of a cookshop, to see if they will run to a full meal—as some few here have had to do ”

“ The broad and immediate result is, partly through a recent necessity for thinking and acting in large masses, partly through the instinct of mankind to draw together and cry out when calamity hits them, and very largely through the quickening of communications, the power of the Tribe over the individual has become more extended, particular, pontifical, and, using the word in both senses, impertinent, than it has been for many generations- Some men accept this omnipresence of crowds ”

“ Remember always that, except for the appliances we make, the rates at which we move ourselves and our possessions through space, and the words which we use, nothing in life changes. The utmost any generation can do is to rebaptize each spiritual or emotional rebirth in its own tongue. ”

“ For it is he, and not our derivatively educated minds or our induced emotions, who preserves in us the undefeated senior instinct of independence. You can test this by promising yourself not to do a thing, and noticing the scandalous amount of special pleading that you have to go through with yourself if you break your promise. A man does not always remember, or follow up, the great things which he has promised himself or his friends to do ”

“ It would better suit the spirit of the age if personal independence could be guaranteed for all by some form of co-ordinated action combined with public assistance and so forth. Unfortunately there are still a few things in this world that a man must manage for himself: his own independence is one of them ”

“ It comes down from the dumb and dreadful epoch when all that Man knew was that he was himself, and not another, and therefore the loneliest of created beings; and you know that there is no loneliness to equal the loneliness of youth at war with its surroundings in a world that does not care. ”

“ Our self-expression may have been a trifle crude, but the instinct that prompted it was that primal instinct of independence which antedates the social one, and makes the young at times a little difficult. ”

“ It is both sedative and anti-spasmodic—it makes for calm in the individual and forbearance towards the Tribe—to know that you hold even seven days' potential independence in reserve—and owed to no man. One is led on to stretch that painfully extorted time to one month if possible; and as one sees that this is possible, the possibilities grow. Bit by bit, one builds up and digs oneself into a base whence one can move in any direction, and fall back upon in any need. The need may be merely to sit still and consider, as did our first ancestors, what manner of animal we are ”

“ The post-war world which discusses so fluently and frankly the universality and cogency of Sex as the dominant factor of life, has adopted a reserved and modest attitude in its handling of the imperious and inevitable details of mere living and working. ”

“ And their ownership was based upon the truth that if you have not your own rations you must feed out of your Tribe's hands—with all that that implies.
Should any of you care to own yourselves on these lines, your insurances ought to be effected in those first ten years of a young man’s life when he is neither seen nor heard. This is the period—one mostly spends it in lodgings, alone—that corresponds to the time when Man in the making began to realize that he was himself and not another. ”

“ Unfortunately—most unfortunately—we have no record of the meeting of the World’s First Liar with the World’s Second Liar; but from what we know of their descendants to-day, they were probably of opposite sexes, married at once, and, begat a numerous progeny. For there is no doubt that Mankind suffered much and early from this same vice of lying. One sees that in the enormous value attached by the most primitive civilizations to the practice of telling the Truth ”

“ This is because Man has lived with himself as an individual, vastly longer than he has lived with himself under tribal conditions. Consequently, facts about his noble solitary self and his earliest achievements had time to get well fixed in his memory. He knew he was not altogether one with the beasts. His amazing experiences with his first lie had shown him that he was something of a magician, if not a miracle-worker ”

“ It is a little hard to liberalize persons who have done their own weighing and measuring with broken teacups by the light of tallow candles. No! Those thrifty souls must have been a narrow and an anfractuous breed to handle ”

“ These were men who intended to own themselves, in obedience to some dream, leading, or word which had come to them. They knew that it would be a hard and long task, so they set about it with their own iron rations on their own backs, and they walked along the sands here to pick up driftwood to keep the fire going in their lodgings. ”

“ And your generation succeeds to an unpromising and dishevelled heritage. In addition to your own sins, which will be numerous but quite normal, you have to carry the extra handicap of the sins of your fathers. ”