Who thinks a dog is impure or obscene because its body is not covered with suffocating and annoying clothes? What would you think of the meanness of a man who would put a skirt upon his, horse and compel it to walk or run with such a thing impeding its limbs? Why, the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" would arrest him, take the beast from him, and he would be sent to a lunatic asylum for treatment on the score of an impure mind. And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the creatures you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts and the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the obscene human body. There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women.
Voltairine de Cleyre
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Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals. As childhood advances to manhood, the transition from bad manners to bad morals is almost imperceptible. Vulgar and obscene forms of speech keep vulgar and obscene objects before the mind, engender impure images in the imagination, and make unlawful desires prurient. From the prevalent state of the mind, actions proceed, as water rises from a fountain.
Horace Mann
Of course man is useful to man, because his body is a marvellous machine and his mind an organ of wonderful efficiency. But he is a spirit as well, and this spirit is truly known only by love. When we define a man by the market value of the service we can expect of him, we know him imperfectly. With this limited knowledge of him it becomes easy for us to be unjust to him and to entertain feelings of triumphant self-congratulation when, on account of some cruel advantage on our side, we can get out of him much more than we have paid for. But when we know him as a spirit we know him as our own. We at once feel that cruelty to him is cruelty to ourselves, to make him small is stealing from our own humanity...
Rabindranath Tagore
We are permitted to ride, providing we sit in a position ruinous to the horse; providing we wear a riding-habit long enough to hide the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds of gravel to cheat the wind in its free blowing, so running the risk of disabling ourselves completely should accident throw us from the saddle. Think how we swim! We must even wear clothing in the water, and run the gauntlet of derision, if we dare battle in the surf minus stockings!
Voltairine de Cleyre
I think that Hitler was abnormal in his sexual needs. That is, he needed too little from the opposite sex. He considered women as objects of beauty, and he often talked with affection about his own mother. I obtained the impression that he disliked his father, because he never mentioned him. But it is a bad thing if a man has too little Eros in him. It makes him insensitive, and probably leads to cruelty. Freud, Sigmund Freud, the last of the great German psychiatrists, who died in England, pointed out the relationship between frustrated love and cruelty. I believe it is what you psychiatrists term sadism. I'm convinced that a man who does not need the love of a woman, and thinks he can forgo it, or who does forgo it, can turn to cruelty and sadism as a substitute.
Hans Frank
I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible with the command "Thou shalt not be aware" [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation.
Alice Miller
de Cleyre, Voltairine
de Coubertin, Pierre
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