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If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.

Herman Melville

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Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Events
Deemed
Hurt
Forbid
Books
Sale
Fear
Censorship
Facts
Rage
Dream
Proof
Baneful
Book
Atheism
Doting
Men
Dreams
Censoring

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Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.
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Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
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Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
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Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
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If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.
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What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.
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There are hardly five critics in America and several of them are asleep.
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We are not a nation, so much as a world for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.
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Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
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An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
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It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.
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Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.
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The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
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