Harold Edmund Stearns Quotes & Sayings

We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so. — Harold Edmund Stearns

Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror. — Harold Edmund Stearns

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? — Harold Edmund Stearns