Herbert Spencer
"The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence."
Francis Galton
"One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands."
"I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary."
Hereditary Genius (1869; 2005), p. 56
"There is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilisation."
Hereditary Genius (1869), p. 414
William Graham Sumner
"A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be...The law of survival of the fittest was not made by man, and it cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest."
--- William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
And finally from Cornelius Vanderbilt, the alleged model for Nathaniel Taggert in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:
"What do I care about law? Ain't I got the power?"
This Nazi poster from 1938 translates "60,000 Marks is what this person suffering a hereditary disease costs society. Comrades, that is your money too! Read The New Race"
From Gustave Dore's London, A Pilgrimage
"The same sun which never set on the Empire never rose on the dark alleys of East London" -- Will Crook, a 19th century Labour MP educated in the workhouse
Lewis Hine, Child Laborer in a Textile Mill, 1908
Every white-boy nerd who gets turned down by his dream-date for the prom (who chooses a jock or goth or non-white or...another girl, instead), reads Atlas Shrugged and thinks "This is my story! I'm being held-back by genetic inferiors!" Oh, Poor Paul. Poor Mittens.
ReplyDeleteLove it JCF!! :-)
ReplyDeleteLook, until we actually stand up and take action, and that may mean violence, these sorts of people are going to continue to run over us. They think they'd be top, if it weren't for contemptible old civilization - I say yank civilization from under them and see how long they can stand up to us.
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