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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.

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
Men
Shambles
Massacres
Murdered
Struck
Murder
Horror
Students
History

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In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
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The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.
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You know nothing till you know all which is the reason we never know any thing.
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I would prefer not to.
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The Past is the textbook of tyrants the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
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...a man of true science uses few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose Where as the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.
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Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
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The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
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There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan.
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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
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O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.
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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
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Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I look deep down and do believe.
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There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
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In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
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One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocence self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.
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