Nature and Elements
John Steinbeck
Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. . . . An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.
Herbert Spencer
Progress . . . is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature.
Anne Sexton
Set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.
Bertrand Russell
A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
[ Referring to his dog :] Fala’s Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.
