Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1244-1246

3200. That’s how many copies of Moby-Dick were sold during Herman Melville’s lifetime. A critical and commercial flop at the time of his death — by which point he was working as an anonymous customs inspector for the City of New York — it took nearly 50 years for Melville’s book to become the Great American Novel.
How to Get Read on Medium
[emphasis JS]

Espied from some timid man-of-war, or blundering discovery vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fouls, nevertheless shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's
unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log: shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!  And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a  vacuum, because their leader originally leapt there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air!  There's orthodoxy!
Melville, from Moby-Dick

Reason has no chance if men [sic] are starving, or even if they have undue cause for envy. But granted an economy that is no longer competitive, in which the highest yield of production is wisely and evenly distributed among all mankind, then reason will have a chance.

Herbert Read

The Politics Of The Unpolitical (1963)
[emphasis JS]