31 Quotes by William Winwood Reade

It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.

Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in which there was no need for miracles. Even if he was wrong, he was grown-up.

One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man...It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.

What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?

A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.