The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.
From Robert Green Ingersoll
Nature is filled with tendencies and obstructions. Extremes beget limitations, even as a river by its own swiftness creates obstructions for itself.
The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.
It has been said that a man of genius should select his ancestors with great care - and yet there does not seem to be as much in heredity as most people think. The children of the great are often small.
Kings had their clowns, the people their actors and musicians. Shakespeare was scheduled as a servant. It is thus that successful stupidity has always treated genius.
Shakespeare pursued the highway of the right. He did not seek to put his characters in a position where it was right to do wrong.
The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.
The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.
Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.
I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber.
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