In order to ameliorate without commotion new institutions must be made, as it were, to rise out of those which the barbarism of centuries has consecrated. It will one day seem incredible that until the year 1826 there existed no law in the Great Antilles to prevent the sale of young infants and their separation from their parents, or to prohibit the degrading custom of marking the negroes with a hot iron, merely to enable these human cattle to be more easily recognized.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Reform must grow from existing institutions to avoid chaos.
- In plain terms
- Make new laws grow out of old ones to prevent trouble.
- What can you take from it?
- Change works best when rooted in existing structures.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Can you reform without destroying the old?
Another view
Sometimes existing institutions are too corrupt to reform.
More from Alexander von Humboldt
Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.
Permalink to quote #5 The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to repr…
Permalink to quote #7 The expression of vanity and self-love becomes less offensive, when it retains something of simplicity and frankness.
Permalink to quote #4
Related quotes
You realize that suicide's a criminal offense - In less enlightened times they'd have hung you for it.
Peter CookPeter Cook quote #3 Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into…
Emma GoldmanEmma Goldman quote #3 Men may die, but the fabric of our free institutions remains unshaken.
Chester A. ArthurChester A. Arthur quote #6