“One day, we will have to stand before the God of history. And we will talk in terms of things we've done. And its seems to me that I can hear the God of history saying, 'That was not enough. For I was hungry, and you fed me not. I was naked, and you clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and you provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.'" Martin Luther King
“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”Adam Smith
"It is a question the historians will ask with interest - the gentle, detached, not altogether loving interest with which historians have always questioned the impotent spirits of the dead. Young men working in the paper rubbish of our lives, the old journals, the marginal notations, the printed works, will discover (or so they will think) that the scholars and the writers of our generation in this country had been warned of danger as men were rarely warned before.
They will discover (or so they will think) that the common inherited culture of the West, by which alone our scholars and our writers lived, had been attacked in other countries with a stated and explicit purpose to destroy. They will discover that that purpose had been realized. They will discover that a similar purpose backed by similar forces, created by similar conditions, was forming here.
And it will seem to them strange - ironical and strange - that the great mass of American scholars and American writers made no effort to defend either themselves or the world by which they lived.
They will make of course the necessary reservations. They will note that societies of scholars and associations of writers adopted resolutions declaring their devotion to civilization. They will note that certain young novelists and poets, the most generous and gallant of their time, unable to endure the outrage and injustice, gave up their lives as writers and enlisted in the hopeless armies to fight brutality with force.
But of those who truly faced this danger not with their bodies but with their minds, of those who fought the enemies of the intellect with the weapons of the intellect, devoting to that warfare all the strength, all the imagination, all the resources of courage and inventiveness, all the watchfulness by day and night, all the last reserves of hope and skill and pain which men must use whose lives and more than lives are put in danger - of those who fought this danger with the weapons by which this danger could be overcome, they will record the names of very few.
And they will ask the question, Why did we, scholars and writers in America, in this time, we who had been warned of our danger not only by explicit threats but by explicit action, why did we not fight this danger while the weapons we used best - the weapons of ideas and words - could still be used against it?"
Archibald Macleish, The Irresponsibles, 1940
