"Perfectability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and manner all greatly in his favour. In his first attack he used the arms, which in general have been considered as belonging to the other side of the question. He quizzed Mr. Owen most unmercifully; pinched him here for his parallelograms; hit him there for his human perfectibility, and kept the whole audience in a roar of laughter. Mr. Owen joined in it most heartily himself, and listened to him throughout with the air of a man who is delighted at the good things he is hearing, and exactly in the cue ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason; for, was man created perfect, or did a flood of knowledge break in upon him, when he arrived at maturity, that precluded error, I should doubt whether his existence would be continued ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway." In the consciousness of the average householder miracles like these formed the pattern of his belief in the perfectibility of ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... intrepid faith in the perfectibility of man. His doctrine was one of non-intervention; that the powerful can afford to be lenient; that mankind continually moves toward the light if not too much interfered with. By his influence the darker shapes of repression were banished from the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... formulate a definition of progress which does not assume the perfectibility of mankind, which does not regard progress as a necessity, and which does not assume to say with finality what has happened or is likely to happen to humanity as ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... we know him for what he is—a romancer of a violent idealistic type masquerading as an implacable realist; a lyric pessimist at the beginning of his literary career, a sonorous optimist at the close, with vague socialistic views as to the perfectibility of the human race. But he traversed distances before he finally found himself a field in which stirred and struggled all human animality. And he was more Zola when he wrote Therese Raquin than in his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... greatly increased it in 1770, by marrying a daughter of one of the richest planters in Hayti. Like many other men of his rank at that time, he was an ardent admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a firm believer in the native nobility and general perfectibility of man. He was a very popular landlord, and his generosity was equal to his wealth. During six months of a severe famine he fed the peasants of Montsallier at his own expense. He was one of the believers in Madame de Stael's man of destiny, her father, the Genevese banker, Necker. In November ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... ideologue was often in Bonaparte's mouth; and in using it he endeavoured to throw ridicule on those men whom he fancied to have a tendency towards the doctrine of indefinite perfectibility. He esteemed them for their morality, yet he looked on them as dreamers seeking for the type of a universal constitution, and considering the character of man in the abstract only. The ideologues, according to him, looked ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... style of animadversion. I am sick at heart with the parallel of contrasts between our barbarian and civilized social systems: it is so unsatisfactory, it is so disheartening, and takes away all hope, all faith in the progress and perfectibility of the human race. One thing, however, is certain, that unless we can bring our minds to form a just appreciation of ourselves, unless we can learn to know ourselves, there is no hope, no chance of advancing in ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... of maturity, it is liable to be attacked by the same fits of the marvellous which affected its infancy;—and the following extract from one of the enthusiastic Virtuosi in the infancy of science, rivals the visions of "the perfectibility of man" of which we hear so much at this late period. Some, perhaps, may consider these strong tendencies of the imagination, breaking out at these different periods in the history of science, to indicate results, of which the mind feels a consciousness, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli |
