Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram (December 16, 1863 – September 22, 1942) was a prolific and influential American architect.

Quotes about Ralph Adams Cram

• Mr. Cram’s thesis is that we do not behave like human beings because the great majority of us, the masses of mankind, are not human beings. We have all along assumed that the zoological classification of man is also a competent psychical classification; that all creatures having the physical attributes which put them in the category Homo sapiens also have the psychical attributes which put them in the category of human beings; and this, Mr. Cram says, is wholly unwarranted and an error of the first magnitude. Consequently we have all along been putting expectation upon the masses of Homo sapiens which they are utterly incapable of meeting. … My change of philosophical base had one curious and wholly unforeseen effect, though it followed logically enough. Since then I have found myself quite unable either to hate anybody or to lose patience with anybody. … My change of base brought me into a much more philosophical temper. … One can hate human beings, at least I could,—I hated a lot of them when that is what I thought they were,—but one can’t hate the sub-human creatures or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly. If an animal is treacherous, you avoid him but can’t hate him, for that is the way he is. … The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox or polecat in the land.
  • Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Chicago: 1964), pp. 136-139