Passages with Solved Precis India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else. The spectacle of what is called religion in India and elsewhere had filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost, always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma, bigotry, superposition and exploitation, and the preservation of the vested interests. And, yet,...

Passages with Solved Precis The great Roman orator, Cicero, in his celebrated treatise on friendship, remarks with truth that it increases happiness and diminishes misery by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our sorrows. When we do well, it is delightful to have friends who are so proud of our success that they receive as much pleasure from it as we do ourselves. For the friendless man, the...

Passages with Solved Precis The first thing necessary to the pleasure of reading is that when people are young they should acquire the habit of reading. This is becoming more and more difficult. Before I was aware of things in the world, the Penny Post had already begun to make a change adverse to reading. By consuming a vast amount of time in correspondence that was unnecessary, trivial or irksome. Railways...

Passages with Solved Precis There is no doubt that people are growing more and more interested in the seas, and that there is a great need for that interest. Men have long tried to probe the secrets of the oceans to gain knowledge for its own sake, but there are other practical reasons for doing so. The sea can provide us with many things that we need in everyday life. Future...

Passages with Solved Precis There is no end to attempts to size up man and put him in a little bottle with a neat lable as if he were a butterfly or something. Clothes it is said, and manners, make the man; he is judged by the company he keeps, the books he borrows, the food he shows a preference to eat, the consumer goods he hopes to buy, the games...

Passages with Solved Precis There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness. The things that it must avoid, and that have brought it to the brink of catastrophe, are...

Passages with Solved Precis The leading distinction between dog and man after and perhaps before the different duration of their lives is that the one can speak and the other cannot. The absence of the power of the speech confines the dog in the development of this intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of metaphysics. At the same time it saves him from many superstitions,...

Passages with Solved Precis When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to resume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all...