The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by Irving Babbitt
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Irving Babbitt. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
EXPLORE BY TOPIC
Selected quotes by Irving Babbitt
For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.
Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.
A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.
The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.
A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.
The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.
Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.
Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.
According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.
Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.
We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.
Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.
The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.
Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.
If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.
Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.
More quotes attributed to Irving Babbitt are available across the Mayalines library.
Related author collections
Explore authors represented in the same topics.