Quotes and Literary Items Relevant to Circumcision -------------------------------------------------- Compiled by Stan Emerson and Geoffrey T. Falk Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. ---H. G. Wells The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth. ---Jean de la Bruyere If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. ---Anatole France The curse of man and the cause of nearly all his woe is his stupendous capacity to believe the incredible. ---H. L. Mencken Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true. ---Thomas Paine The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. ---Thomas Paine Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. ---Thomas Jefferson In a sentence he sums up the dark and deadly pages of Christian history: "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." ---Herbert J. Muller quoting Radhakrishnan, in Uses of The Past, Mentor Books, 1952 [Beyond any doubt, the above applies to another religion in particular, except of course in the minds and certain actions of the religion-damaged. -SE] The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. ---Albert Einstein All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field. ---Albert Einstein Every great reform which has been effected has consisted, not in doing something new, but in undoing something old. ---Henry Thomas Buckel Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. ---Michel de Montaigne To free man from error is to give, not to take away. ---Arthur Schopenhauer I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me. ---Terence In civilized society most educated people are not even aware of the extent to which savage ignorance survives at their doors. ---Sir James Frazer [his statement after analyzing the prevalence of such customs as circumcision among primitive and modern peoples. -SE] A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it the superficial appearance of being right. ---Thomas Paine There is nothing so powerful as the truth and nothing so strange. ---Daniel Webster (1782-1852) At no time are human rights more threatened than when we act purporting to do good to others. ---? Truth invites examination. ---Aristotle In all of biology, the nonengineered individual is the strongest. All of his parts are there for an excellent purpose. ---Ronald Poland, M. D. (American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force Committee on Circumcision) "What happens to you here is forever. ---George Orwell, 1984 The most tragic words in any language are "too late". ---author unknown Hatred is human; indifference is the final degradation of humanity. ---Harvey Goldberg I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male. ---Thomas Szasz, M. D., 3rd International Symposium on Circumcision, Univ. of Maryland, May 1994 (author of The Manufacture of Madness; read the chapter "Masturbatory Insanity") No lie can live forever. ---? The whole of anything is never told. ---Henry James Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. ---Thomas Hardy Our posterity will wonder at our ignorance of things so plain. ---Seneca (Roman statesman and philosopher, 4 B. C.?- A. D. 65) If anything is sacred the human body is sacred. ---Walt Whitman Mutilate: implies the cutting off or removal of a part essential to completeness, not only of a person but also of a thing, and to his or its perfection, beauty, entirety, or fulfullment of function. ---Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms, 1968 But deception is often nonverbal, and conveyed instead by gestures or false visual clues; even by silence, as in situations where a clear risk ought to be pointed out. ---Encyclopedia of Bioethics, The Free Press, 1978 Nature is a possessive mistress, and whatever mistakes she makes about the structure of the less essential organs such as the brain and stomach, in which she is not much interested, you can be sure that she knows best of the genital organs. ---Sir James Spence First, be a good animal. ---Ralph Waldo Emerson [What animal mutilates the genitals of its offspring? -SE] What looks like a pin point opening at 7 months will become a wide channel of communication at 17. ---Sir James Spence [his comment, to reassure parents, on the change that will occur in the size of the opening of the foreskin. -SE] The foreskin therefore can be likened to a rose bud which remains closed and muzzled. Like a rosebud, it will only blossom when the time is right. No one opens a rosebud to make it blossom. ---H. L. Tan, M. D. [His remarks on the fact that for almost all infants the foreskin is tightly attached to the underlying glans and is this way for a wonderful reason. In time it disengages from the glans on its own and is then retractable. In the infant or young boy, it should never be forcibly retracted by any doctor, nurse or parent. -SE] The worst "foreskin problem" most intact males ever have is that someone thinks they have a problem. ---John A. Erickson All of the western world raises its children uncircumcised and it seems logical that, with the extent of health knowledge in those countries, such a practice must be safe. - C. Everett Koop, M.D., Former Surgeon General Saturday Evening Post, July, 1982 Torture is not a private thing- it's noisy. You can't ignore it. ---? By means of shrewd and unremitting propaganda it is possible to make people think that heaven is hell and that hell is heaven. ---Adolf Hitler It's not circumcision that needs to be studied; it's circumcisers. ---John A. Erickson (Playboy, April 1983) There is nothing more tragic in life than the utter impossibility of changing what you have done. ---John Galsworth[y]? It is not easy to see evil in something that has the sanction of long tradition, but traditions can be bad or good. They represent inherited error as well as inherited truth. ---Archbishop Lang, United Kingdom The epitaph that I would write for history would say: I conceal nothing. It is not enough not to lie. One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent. ---Leo Tolstoy What's done to children, they will do to society. ---Karl Menninger There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance- that principle is contempt prior to investigation. ---Herbert Spencer All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. ---attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer Religious abuse is an attack in the name of God on the integrity and inviolability of an individual's spirit, mind, body and freedom. ---George Fowler (b. 1930) (former Trappist monk, married former nun in 1969, still happily married to her, presently counselor to individuals suffering lingering effects of abuse inflicted in the name of God, church or religion.) "For your own good" is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. ---Janet Frame, psychiatric survivor Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue. ---? Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. ---Marie Curie Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light. ---Matthew Arnold 1822--1888 `Leave Truth to the police and us; we know the Good; We build the Perfect City time shall never alter; Our Law shall guard you always like a cirque of mountains, Your Ignorance keep off evil like a dangerous sea; You shall be consummated in the General Will, Your children innocent and charming as the beasts.' ---W. H. Auden [reflects closed attitude of some? -gtf] The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears. ---Francis Bacon, "Of Parents and Children" Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter. ---Francis Bacon The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. (Ezekiel 18:2) But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free. ---Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806--1861, The Cry of the Children (1843) When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill. --William Blake, "Nurse's Song" Men are but children of a larger growth; Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain. ---John Dryden 1631--1700, IV.i For all we have and are, For all our children's fate, Stand up and take the war. The Hun is at the gate! ---Rudyard Kipling, `For All We Have and Are' If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven. ---George Bernard Shaw, 1856--1950, `How to Beat Children' His big tears, for he wept full well, Turned to mill-stones as they fell. And the little children, who Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them. ---Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792--1822, IV. Of `Fraud' (Lord Eldon) But it does move. (Eppur si muove.) ---Galileo Galilei [Galileo was persecuted by the Church for promulgating his theory that the earth moves around the sun. But the sphere of accepted values and beliefs moves also. -gtf] Lord, I ascribe it to Thy grace, and not to chance, as others do, That I was born of Christian race, and not a Heathen, or a Jew. ---Isaac Watts 1674--1748. `Divine Songs for Children' Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan---spoiled. ---Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto (1892), bk.ii, ch.6 [Matt Wiener loves to misquote this passage. Has he read Zangwill?! -gtf] Ye have put off the old man with his deeds: And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. ---(Colossians 9) `But the Emperor has nothing on at all!' cried a little child. ---Hans Christian Andersen 1805--1875, The Emperor's New Clothes Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. (Job 3:3) Go practise if you please With men and women: leave a child alone For Christ's particular love's sake!---so I say. ---Robert Browning 1812--1889, bk.iii, l.88 So for the mother's sake the child was dear, And dearer was the mother for the child. ---Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772--1834 `Sonnet to a Friend Who Asked How I Felt When the Nurse First Presented My Infant to Me' Reader, behold! this monster wild Has gobbled up the infant child. The infant child is not aware It has been eaten by the bear. ---A.E. Housman 1859--1936, `Infant Innocence'. Laurence Housman, A.E.H. (1937), p.256 Maxima debetur puero reverentia, siquid Turpe paras, nec tu pueri contempseris annos. (A child deserves the maximum respect; if you ever have something disgraceful in mind, don't ignore your son's tender years.) ---Juvenal, A.D. c.60--c.130, xiv.47 Like all the very young we took it for granted that making love is child's play. ---Nancy Mitford 1904--1973, The Pursuit of Love, ch.3 How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. -Socrates I'd like to know what a fine Bordeaux tastes like---but somebody once cut off my Bordeaux receptors. Now everything tastes like Diet Coke. Well, that's O.K. After all, Coke is pretty good. Sure goes great with a burger and fries. And there ain't nothing else to live for. ---Geoffrey T. Falk