1927 Quotes

“Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.”
― George Bernard Shaw , Man and Superman

“Perhaps there is no better illustration of the ethical impotency of the modern church than its failure to deal with the evils and ethical problems of stock manipulation. Millions in property values are created by pure legerdemain. Stock dividends, watered stock and excessive rise in stock values, due to the productivity of the modern machine, are accepted by the church without murmur if only a slight return is made by the beneficiaries through church philanthropies [1927].”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“We are trying to find out the meanings which lay in the minds of the originators of the Masonic Symbolisms as the reasons why they instituted these symbolic lessons. Let us remember this point very carefully and also the further fact that all these symbols date back to a period far anterior to the time of Christ.”
― Prentiss Tucker, The Lost Key: An Explanation and Application of the Masonic Symbols

“So the recognition of the obvious fact that many of the Rites and Symbols of Masonry were devised from the standpoint of a believer in Rebirth or the evolution of the soul, does not involve any necessity on the part of the Masonic student to believe the same or to make it a part of his religious dogma any more than the Egyptologist, when he deciphers a prayer to Ra, the Sun god, carved upon some Egyptian tomb thousands of years before the time of Christ, is thereby compelled to believe in the existence and power of Ra and begin to worship him with the same prayer.”
― Prentiss Tucker, The Lost Key: An Explanation and Application of the Masonic Symbols