Nuer people

“ It seems to us, if we do not err, that there is something of settlement and duration. Man did not meet there only to arrange and devour the feast, but to employ himself besides in domestic avocations, in preparing implements and arms, to sew garments, and make nets—in a word, to inhabit them; besides, to exercise the practices of their religious worship, and, perhaps, also to burn their dead, and all these after the fashion of barbarians, such as the people of the marl-beds must have been. ”

“ The common people of the West have a firm belief that God is on their side, no matter what trouble he allows to come over them. "Sure I do feel my heart afire, when gintlemen sit on my car driving through this loneliness an' talk of over-population. Over-population! ”

“ It is rather the contrary that is not only probable—nay, it is palpable to-day: these bearers of vindictive instincts that have to be bottled up, these descendants of all European and non-European slavery, especially of the pre-Aryan population—these people, I say, represent the decline of humanity! These "tools of civilisation" are a disgrace to humanity, and constitute in reality more of an argument against civilisation, more of a reason why civilisation should be suspected. ”

“ This dilemma has confronted individuals and sub-groups in various civilizations. It has been particularly in evidence during periods of decline and social disintegration. It has led people of both sexes and all ages to uproot themselves from the old social order and reestablish themselves in a social order "nearer to the heart's desire." ”

“ What could inflict more injury to our higher nature, to our real culture? And yet in this lies concealed a deep instinct of a purely moral nature. It does not, however, concern merely that people whom the course of events has cast among other nations, still much less the individual man, who, without choice or intention, has been born among, and therefore forms a part of them. ”

“ Western civilization, in the early years of the present century, produced a generation of insecure, unsettled, anxious, worried, harried people. This is generally true of young, middle aged and old, of rich and poor. ”

“ The danger of setting afloat in the community so vast a discordant element as a body of three millions of people, — and the number continually increasing, — who, in the nature of things, can never amalgamate with the general mass, — might well trouble, as it has troubled, the minds of the wisest statesmen and thinkers of America. ”

“ A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”
It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs. ”

“ When our ancestors were rude barbarians, living in caves and in holes they dug in the ground, the little people dwelt in cities built with wonderful skill and ingenuity; and while our forefathers were leading a rude, selfish life,—herding together, it is true, but with no organized government or fixed principles of industry and good order, living each one for himself, the strong oppressing the weak,—the little folks were ruled by a strict civil and military code. ”

“ The group considers itself better qualified to survive than neighbor groups. Such ideas, carried to their logical conclusion, make the group in question superior to its neighbors in survival qualities and a people chosen by its gods.
A superior people, chosen by its gods, is in a class by itself. Other people, by comparison, are inferior. It is the destiny of the superior people to take the lands of their inferior neighbors, and, whenever opportunity offers, to defeat the neighbors in battle, capture them and force them to do the bidding of the captors. ”

“ I never more clearly comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom.
"I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come to their own. ”

“ "With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation," said Howe. ”

“ And in the end, it has so overstimulated the energies of the population to maintain the material engagements of the state, and of society at large, that the moral condition of the people has been entirely lost sight of. ”

“ No poor people were clamoring for a share in the ager publicus, like the Roman plebeians,—no disfranchised were struggling for their rights as human beings, like the slaves led by Spartacus,—no special class was fighting for certain privileges, like the cities in the Middle Ages,—nor was it an insurrection of visionaries, eager to bear arms in behalf of their religion, like the Waldenses, Albigenses, the Huguenots and the protestant reformers. ”

“ The slaving Poor are incapable of any Principles: Gentlemen may be converted to true Principles, by Time and Experience: The middling Rank of Men have Curiosity and Knowledge enough to form Principles, but not enough to form true Ones, or correct any Prejudices that they may have imbib'd: And 'tis among the middling Rank of People, that Tory Principles do at present prevail most in England. ”

“ But there were other causes, namely, the existence in various parts of Europe of conditions which encouraged the people to emigrate. Religious persecution was one of the first things that drove men or women to America. ”

“ You have only studied the ways of kings and governments—each one for itself. 'Come over my boundary, and I will cleave your head; or, rather, I will send my common people to do it, for a little blood-letting from time to time is good for that vile and ignorant body.' But the vile and ignorant body may begin to tire of that recurrent blood-letting, and might perhaps even say, 'Brother across the boundary, I have no quarrel with you. You are poor and ignorant like myself; the travail of the earth lies hard on you ”

“ But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor. It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid, fathomless sense of diversion. ”

“ The persecution of this unfortunate race which ensued was of so ruthless a character that neither women, children, nor the aged were spared, with the result, we are told, that very few were left alive. ”

“ The men, women, and children who compose a society at any time are the unconscious depositaries and transmitters of the mores. They inherited them without knowing it; they are molding them unconsciously; they will transmit them involuntarily. The people cannot make the mores. They are made by them. ”

“ THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; ”

“ Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people's altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one's own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature." ”

“ That's my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I'm all for the criminals—give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you'd have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy. ”

“ Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak. ”

“ Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that each of the component elements making up the expanding civilization--each people, city, state, nation, empire--developed its own total culture pattern, subject to the pressures mutually exerted by neighboring communities. ”

“ I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority—this infernal compact majority—that poisons the sources of our moral life and infects the ground we stand on. ”

“ How can any one dare compare the mechanic of this land (whose inferiority, in any substantial particular, in intelligence, in virtue, in wealth, to the other classes of our society, I have yet to learn) with that race of outcasts, of which so terrific a picture is presented by recent writers—the poor of Europe?—a race among no inconsiderable portion of whom famine and pestilence may be said to dwell continually; many of whom are without morals, without education, without a country, without a God! ”

“ Whoever believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity, in which alone it can exist, prosper, and continue to develop itself to higher destinies; whoever looks upon civilization as a good, having value and deserving to be defended, must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin. To him who, with Nietzsche, is enthusiastic over the ‘freely-roving, lusting beast of prey,’ we cry, ‘Get you gone from civilization! ”

“ On the other hand, they who are animated with the unconquerable spirit of the Social revolution, they who have the moral courage to stand erect, to assert their convictions, to stand by them, to go to jail or to hell for them—they are writing their names in this crucial hour, they are writing their names in fadeless letters in the history of mankind. ”

“ But where now are the colored population, that seemed to be so numerous every where else? Have they no God? Have they no interest in the Savior’s example and precepts? Have they no need of consolation, of faith in the Unseen, to help them bear up under the burdens and anxieties of life? Is their futurity so uncertain or so worthless that they need no guide to a better country, or that they can be turned off with a guide as ignorant and blind as themselves? ”

“ It describes exclusively the most loathsome and hideous traits of civilization, such as are found mainly in the large cities. It takes especial pains to portray corruption, suffering and moral weakness, human beings sick unto death and a society at its last gasp, and as we finish a work belonging to this school, a plaintive voice seems to murmur with monotonous repetition. "You see, tormented reader, that this life which is here described with an inexorable fidelity to nature, is really not worth living." ”

“ I say modern society, though poverty is not modern, for ancient society had poverty worse than ours and a side still darker yet. Cannibalism, butchery of captives after battle, frequent or continual wars for the sake of plunder, and the slavery of the weak—these were the dark side of society in four great periods of human history, the savage, the barbarous, the classic and the feudal. ”

“ Outside is the hateful city, but the sun also, bringing strange fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. So much lies back of them, in that cell of humiliation, where they were not born! What if there should be freedom again for them, beyond death? ”

“ Not satisfied with natural barriers, men erected high walls of sect and caste, to exclude their fellows, and the men of one sect were sure that the men of all other sects were wrong—and doomed to be lost. Thus, when real mountains no longer separated man from man, mountains were made out of molehills—mountains of immemorial misunderstanding not yet moved into the sea!
Barriers of race, of creed, of caste, of habit, of training and interest separate men today, as if some malign genius were bent on keeping man from his fellows, begetting suspicion, uncharitableness, and hate. ”

“ Through out the whole length and breadth of the civilized world there is not a single nook or corner to be found, in which the autocratic yoke of Religion has been shaken off.
We learn from history that the family, property, State and Religion are the forms in which civilization has developed. ”

“ A strange spectacle, arousing astonishment and indignation, incredulity and ridicule, this mediæval comedy in the very midst of our modern civilization! One class of human beings assumes the airs of ancient Egyptian or Indian caste, in the midst of our Caucasian humanity. It lays claim to titles which once signified certain offices, but today have no sense whatever. ”

“ Such a retreat rounds out the later phases of a cycle of civilization--the phases of decline and final dissolution.
Civilizations perish in the first instance because of internal contradictions and conflicts, the struggle to grab, monopolize, and keep wealth, status, power.
They perish because of the division of the nucleus and its associates and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They perish because of the hard class and caste lines that grow out of economic contradictions ”

“ Dudley," said Norries, in his abrupt way, "that, notwithstanding all the wickedness and the crime which this world contains, all the folly, the feebleness, and the selfishness which are to be found in every class of life, there is still devotion more high and pure, honesty more incorruptible, and wisdom more beautiful, than even the enthusiasm of inexperience can picture to the mind of youth?" ”