Henry Morton Stanley

Sir Henry Morton Stanley (28 January 1841 – 10 May 1904), a Welsh-born reporter for the New York Herald, went to Africa in search of missionary and explorer David Livingstone. He was later a British Member of Parliament.

Quotes:

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
- Spoken on 10 November 1871 in Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania.
- There were no other white men known to be in the vicinity. As the two had not been formally introduced, it was a proper way to address Livingstone without committing a breach of etiquette.

Ed. Lady Dorothy Stanley, Houghton Mifflin, 1909

As seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the newspapers. The one reminded one that, apart from God, my life was but a bubble of air, and it bade me remember my Creator; the other fostered arrogance and loneliness. (p. 254)

Religion acts as a moral gardener, to weed out, or suppress, evil tendencies, which, like weeds: grow.

Though many illusions are of a character we should gladly cherish, yet the sooner we lose some of them, the sooner we gain the power of seeing clearly into things. The one who possesses least has the best chance of becoming wise. The man who travels, and reflects, loses illusions faster than he who stays at home. (p. 523)

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.
- Colin Wilson in The Essential Colin Wilson, p. 216

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