Talk:Philip Wylie

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I was there at the Unitarian Church in Tallahassee when Wylie said that. It caused major uproar. Check the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper. 2601:644:500:DF10:BC25:C39:BBBA:9C36 21:39, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

• "Why worry about race? In a century, we'll all be tea-colored!" Tallahssee, Florida Unitarian Church 1958 (Church was burned a week later.)

• 'God,' the saying might also read, "must hate the common people because he made them so common.'

• Both constructs of the aphorism hold true. But, because it is an American convention to adore common people without restriction, I elect here to criticize them, as a lesson. A society which cannot criticize its masses is hamstrung—as ours is. For it is our American common people, and not the highly educated ones, who have chucked overboard the critical method and thereby cut loose the ship of state from its sounding machinery, its rudder, its glass, and its keel, leaving the whole business to drift where the blather of common men blows it.

• Love of liberty is laudable and logically the chief political end of man, so long as it is hitched to responsibleness. Eighteenth century man, politically educated and understanding the major implications of what was going on in his environment, made a fairly responsible voter. Today, common man insists on his right to vote and insists, equally, on the right not to have to know what he is voting about. This folly is pitching all common men rapidly toward the rocks. The current war is a mere reef we are now grating over. What lies beyond may be the greater disaster.

• There is no liberty for a man under any discipline except that which is self-imposed. The imposition of disciplines by the state is called fascism, or tyranny, by common man; and he hates it. By the same token, any nation which subscribes to liberty and then attempts to maintain a majority who have no discipline of themselves, is destined soon to be without freedom. Anarchy exists nowhere in nature. An ascetism, which is to say, a discipline, is imposed upon every living object by its environment and its instincts.

• American liberty has been tentatively saved for the last few decades not by the self-discipline of its citizens but by their instincts, which have not yet been blunted quite enough to prevent the people from realizing imminent dangers at the eleventh hour. Twice, now, we have turned at the last moment and armed ourselves to prevent the discipline of ruthlessness—the next most powerful discipline to responsible liberty—from overthrowing us. This second time, we came within months, and perhaps even weeks, as a body of common men, of a position from which not even our instincts could have extricated us. It is not yet utterly certain that we have escaped, but the presumption is that we shall.

• Our Protestant churches, and, even more especially, the Catholic Church, devote an incredible portion of their political energy—perhaps most of it—to interference with the sex mores of the great non-Protestant and non-Catholic minority. Such religious enterprises are therefore essentially fascistic and in no way democratic. But it is a fact that no law which runs counter to the exact letter of medieval Catholic dogma can be passed in any of our states, and if a sensible law infringes on the archaic attitudes of Protestantism, it cannot be offered in a state legislature.