Saint Francis said: “Blessed is he who loves and does not therefore desire to be loved; Blessed is he who fears and does not therefore desire to be feared; Blessed is he who serves and does not therefore desire to be served; Blessed is he who behaves well toward others and does not desire that others behave well[Read More...]
Annie Sullivan becomes Helen’s teacher Helen Keller was born in 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her father had served as a captain in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and her mother, Kate Adams, was the daughter of a Confederate general. She was also related to Robert E. Lee, so by birth she was certainly a Southerner. Today[Read More...]
A lower-upper middle class family and education Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was the great-grandson of Charles Blair, a wealthy country gentleman, and Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland. Over the generations that separated Eric Blair from his great-grandparents, some of the gentility remained but most of the wealth[Read More...]
Early life and marriage Baroness Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914) was born in Prague as Countess Kinsky. She was the posthumous daughter of a Field Marshall, and during the first part of her life, she accepted the military traditions of her family. Later she vigorously opposed militarism, and she became a leader of the peace movement. It was her arguments[Read More...]
The beautiful red-haired American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), is known for her lyric poetry, but she also wrote some of the finest sonnets in the English language, combining classic form with modern imagery. Many of these sonnets are based on the emotions that she experienced in her love affairs with both men and[Read More...]
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophes.” “I don’t know what will be used in the next world war, but the 4th will be fought with stones.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Besides being one of the greatest physicists of all time, Albert Einstein was a lifelong pacifist,[Read More...]
The son of a southern Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr received his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University in 1955. During his studies, he had admired Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” and he had also been greatly moved by the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King applies the teachings of Thoreau and Gandhi to the[Read More...]
If humans are ever to achieve a stable global society in the future, they will have to become much more modest in their economic behavior and much more peaceful in their politics. For both modesty and peace, Gandhi is a useful source of ideas. The problems with which he struggled during his lifetime are extremely relevant to us in the[Read More...]
Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828. While he was still a child, his parents died, and he became Count Tolstoy, with responsibility for the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana. As a young man, he was attracted to the gay and worldly social life of Moscow, but his diary during this period shows remorse over his pursuit of sensual pleasures.[Read More...]
In the distant future (and perhaps even in the not-so-distant future) industrial civilization will need to abandon its relentless pursuit of unnecessary material goods and economic growth. Modern society will need to re-establish a balanced and harmonious relationship with nature. In preindustrial societies harmony with nature is usually a part of the cultural tradition. In our own time, the same[Read More...]
