1.) Neocons, Pinkos, and Nazis all hate him with the “passionate intensity” Yeats quite correctly attributed to the worst.
2.) He was truly in love with the English language.
From here on, I’ll let the man speak for himself -- for all that he's been dead for 72 years:
“In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely upon the facts before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.”
-- Tremendous Trifles
“I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion. Thus I have always urged in this paper that democracy has a deeper meaning than the democrats understand; that is, that common and popular things, proverbs and ordinary sayings always have something in them unrealized by most who repeat them.”
-- An Accident
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a hassock. William III died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to die by falling over a mountain.”
-- The Advantages of Having One Leg
“Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanism may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us, the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change.”
-- On Lying in Bed
“The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees. The great human heresy is that the trees move the wind. When people begin to say that the material circumstances have alone created moral circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious changes. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?
The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts – including that one.”
-- The Wind and the Trees
“We must face, I fear, the full insanity of what it does mean. It really does mean that a section of the human race is asking whether the primary relations of the two human sexes are particularly good for modern shops. The human race is asking whether Adam and Eve are entirely suitable for Marshall and Selgrove. If this is not topsy-turvy I cannot imagine what would be. We ask whether the universal institution would improve our (please God) temporary institution. Yet I have known many such questions. For instance, I have know a man to ask seriously, ‘Does Democracy Help the Empire?’ Which is like saying, ‘Is art favorable to frescoes?’
I say that there are many such questions asked. But if the world ever runs short of them, I can suggest a large number of questions of precisely the same kind, based on precisely the same principle.
‘Do Feet Improve Boots?’—‘Is Bread Better when Eaten?’—‘Should Hats have Heads in them?’—‘Do People Spoil a Town?’—Do Walls Ruin Wall-papers?’—‘Should Neckties Enclose Necks?’—“Do Hands Hurt Walking-sticks?’—“Does Burning Destroy Firewood?’—“Is Cleanliness Good for Soap?’—“Can Cricket Really Improve Cricket-bats?”—Shall We Take Brides with our Wedding Rings?’ and a hundred others.
-- In Topsy-Turvy Land
“But your modern literature takes insanity as its center. Therefore, it loses the interest even of insanity. A lunatic is not startling to himself, because he is quite serious; that is what makes him a lunatic.”
--The Dragon’s Grandmother
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
--The Red Angel
“Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it. There is a very real thing which may be called the love of humanity; in our time it exists almost entirely among what are called uneducated people; and it does not exist at all among the people who talk about it.”
--The Orthodox Barber
“Now, I for one detest Imperialism, but I have a great deal of sympathy with Jingoism.”
--The Two Noises
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