American writer (1886-1918)
To keep one's reactions warm and true, is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", Atlantic Monthly, April 1912
The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade everyone and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"The State"
The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king.... Kings have often been selected this way in European history, and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"The State"
How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies? The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy--all these moods are equally part of that showery spring-time of life.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", Atlantic Monthly, April 1912
War is such an indefeasible and unescapable Real that the good realist must accept it rather comprehensively. To keep out of it is pure quietism, an acute moral failure to adjust. At the same time, there is an inexorability about war. It is a little unbridled for the realist's rather nice sense of purposive social control. And nothing is so disagreeable to the pragmatic mind as any kind of an absolute. The realist pragmatist could not recognize war as inexorable--though to the common mind it would seem as near an absolute, coercive social situation as it is possible to fall into. For the inexorable abolishes choices, and it is the essence of the realist's creed to have, in every situation, alternatives before him.
RANDOLPH SILLIMAN BOURNE
War and the Intellectuals
Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", Atlantic Monthly, April 1912
In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established--Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", Atlantic Monthly, April 1912