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Home
Authors
Irving Babbitt
American
Critic
About the author
If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#American
#Achievement
The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#People
#Light
#Faith
#Question
#Leadership
Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Will
#Needs
#Self
#Interest
#Happiness
#Humility
Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Work
#Man
#Happiness
#Enjoyment
Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Revolution
#Leader
Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Christianity
#Power
#Knowledge
#Lust
If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Criticism
#Discipline
The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Balance
#Mind
#Unity
#Sanity
To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Failure
#Nations
Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#America
#Confusion
Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Men
#Society
#Military
#Absence
#Discipline
The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Knowledge
#Sympathy
#Stress
The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#World
#Service
The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Today
#Science
#Theology
The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Revolution
The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Civilization
#Unity
#Nationalism
The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Will
#Order
For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Peace
To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Saying
#Today
#Democracy
#Quality
#Quantity
Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#May
#Humanism
We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Leaders
#Romantic
Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Style
#Being
#Excellence
#Jargon
The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Balance
#Sympathy
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Practice
#Democracy
#Feelings
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Day
#World
#State
#American
#Reading
#Present
#Quality
#Quantity
Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Chance
Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Now
#Democracy
Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Right
#Will
#Thinking
#Faith
#Act
#Care
According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Virtue
#Ethics
#Sentiment
A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Remarkable
A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#May
#Faith
#Cause
#Future
#Progress
#Desire
#Mankind
#Sympathy
A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Man
#Needs
#Self
If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
Irving Babbitt,
American
Critic
#Democracy
#Man