Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.
Priests are in bad odor, And yet there shall be no lack of them. The skies shall not lack a spokesman, Nor the spirit of man a voice and a gesture.
Not garbed nor churched, Yet, as of old, in loneliness and anguish, They shall come eating and drinking among us, With scourge, pity, and prayer.
(French philosopher and religious reformer, 1782-1854)
Your task is to form the universal family, to build the City of God, and by a continuous labor gradually to translate His work in Humanity into fact.
When you love one another as brothers, and treat each other reciprocally as such; when each one, seeking his own good in the good of all, shall identify his own life with the life of all, his own interests with the interests of all, and shall be always ready to sacrifice himself for all the members of the common family--then most of the ills which weigh upon the human race will vanish, as thick mists gathered upon the horizon vanish at the rising of the sun.
Records from all the past history of mankind from twenty-five different races; the earliest being about 3500 B. C.
(American historian, who was forced to publish at his own expense the results of his life-time researches into the early history of the working class)
The great strikes and uprisings of the working people of the ancient world are almost unknown to the living age. It matters little how accounts of five immense strike-wars, involving destruction of property and mutual slaughter of millions of people, have been suppressed, or have otherwise failed to reach us; the fact remains that people are absolutely ignorant of these great events. A meagre sketch of Spartacus may be seen in the encyclopedias, but it is always ruined and its interest pinched and blighted by being classed with crime, its heroes with criminals, its theme with desecration. Yet Spartacus was one of the great generals of history; fully equal to Hannibal and Napoleon, while his cause was much more just and infinitely nobler, his life a model of the beautiful and virtuous, his death an episode of surpassing grandeur.