Sadena Meti
20th April 2011, 02:48
First, if you don't know who Percy Bysshe Shelley was, try here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
Consider the following quotes:
This, and no other, is justice: to consider, under all the circumstances and consequences of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action; this is to be just, and there is no other justice. The distinction between justice and mercy was first imagined in the courts of tyrants. Mankind received every relaxation of their tyranny as a circumstance of grace or favor.
If there be no love among men, whatever institutions they may frame must be subservient to the same purpose - to the continuance of inequality. If there be no love among men, it is best that he who sees through the hollowness of their professions should fly from their society, and suffice to his own soul. In wisdom he will thus lose nothing; in power, he will gain everything.
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are. He will discover the meanness and the injustice of sacrificing the reason and the liberty of his fellowmen to the indulgence of his physical appetites, and becoming a party to their degradation by the consummation of his own.
Every man, in proportion to his virtue considers himself, with respect to his great community of mankind, as the steward and guardian of their interest in the property which he chances to possess. Every man, in proportion to his wisdom, sees the manner in which it is his duty to employ the resources which the consent of mankind has entrusted to his discretion. Such is the annihilation of the unjust inequality of powers and conditions existing in the world; and so gradually and inevitably is the progress of equality accommodated to the progress of wisdom and of virtue among mankind.
Consider the following quotes:
This, and no other, is justice: to consider, under all the circumstances and consequences of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action; this is to be just, and there is no other justice. The distinction between justice and mercy was first imagined in the courts of tyrants. Mankind received every relaxation of their tyranny as a circumstance of grace or favor.
If there be no love among men, whatever institutions they may frame must be subservient to the same purpose - to the continuance of inequality. If there be no love among men, it is best that he who sees through the hollowness of their professions should fly from their society, and suffice to his own soul. In wisdom he will thus lose nothing; in power, he will gain everything.
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are. He will discover the meanness and the injustice of sacrificing the reason and the liberty of his fellowmen to the indulgence of his physical appetites, and becoming a party to their degradation by the consummation of his own.
Every man, in proportion to his virtue considers himself, with respect to his great community of mankind, as the steward and guardian of their interest in the property which he chances to possess. Every man, in proportion to his wisdom, sees the manner in which it is his duty to employ the resources which the consent of mankind has entrusted to his discretion. Such is the annihilation of the unjust inequality of powers and conditions existing in the world; and so gradually and inevitably is the progress of equality accommodated to the progress of wisdom and of virtue among mankind.