Samuel Johnson Quotes
He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Vol. 1, Charles Dilly, 1791, p. 289.
Nathaniel Gordon was the first American slave trader to be executed after the slave trade was made illegal. The Erie was his slave ship where, as was typical, many of the captured Blacks, died as a result of the inhuman conditions. Although Gordon was the first person executed in America, the act making the slave trade an act of piracy dated from 1820. See {68753} .
A. B. Magil. Poem written upon the suicide of the Russian Poet, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, 1893-1930. The fact that a Marxist Russian Poet would commit suicide was not seen as the result of a mental problem like depression, but as a political act and a statement of dissatisfaction with 1930 Russia.
Gregory the Great. The particular offences under discussion were incest which was common among the English people before they had been Christianized. The responsibility for acts “in ignorance of the law” has been debated as long as there has been law. Gregory’s view is remarkably contemporary.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
