Herman Melville Quotes
When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?--Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us--Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians--sprung from one head and made in one image.
Melville, Herman. "Mr. Parkman's Tour." The Literary World, vol. 4, no. 113, 31 Mar. 1849, p. 291.
This statement was true in 1938 and was still true in 2012 when this quotation was entered in the collection.
This was a very unusual assertion for Germany where traditionally the Germans had seen themselves as a separate race and often the “master race.” Herder wrote this 50 years before Darwin and 150 years before we had thee scientific proof that race was a meaningless concept and all humans alive today are of the same species. Herder also criticized the historical German persecution of the Jews.
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851), Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia, and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the centennial of his birth in 1919 was the starting point of a Melville revival and Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.
