William Wordsworth Quotes
Great men have been among us; hands that penn'd
And tongues that utter'd wisdom--better none
Wordsworth, William. "Great Men Have Been Among Us." Poems, in Two Volumes, vol. 1, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807, p. 136.
He was referring to the fact that many great men had early views that people find shocking because they are so unexpected based on their mature writings or speeches. But most great men develop personally and intellectually over their career. As an example, see {616330} for an early racist, prejudiced view of Negro laborers.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "The psychical researcher William McDougall."){kind=small}
This quotation illustrates the extreme distortion of even observed evidence that many racists of the early 20th Century went through. Mcdougall was a Harvard professor and was familiar with the intellectual accomplishments of a number of Blacks including W. E. B. Du Bois who also was a Harvard man who was even superior to most whites at that institution. However his racial ideology could not possibly allow that Negroes could be as accomplished as some of them was. His “creative” explanation given here is that all accomplished Blacks must have had white blood, because only white blood could produce such genius. Note also the emphasis that he places on the historical inability of Negroes to form a nation. McDougall knew little about history as there were many Negro nations created from ancient Biblical times throughs the 19th century. Shaka who not only built a Zulu nation but turned it into an expansionist empire contesting England in the Anglo Zulu Wars of the late 19th century as both entires fought to see which would colonize and dominate much of the South of Africa,
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
