Background
Jones was born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of Arthur Winslow Jones (an executive of General Electric) and his wife, Elizabeth Huntington. He moved to the United States with his family when he was 4. He graduated from Harvard University in 1923, and, after working as purser on a tramp steamer that sailed around the world, he joined the Foreign Service. In the early 1930s, he became vice consul at the U.S. embassy in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power. In 1932, for a couple of months he was married to Anna Luise Hauser, née Block (1896–1982), a daughter of the German painter Joseph Block and a descendant of German banker Joseph Mendelssohn. In 1936, he married Mary Carter, with whom he travelled through Spain during that country's civil war, reporting on civilian relief for the Quakers. In 1941, he earned a doctorate in sociology at Columbia University. He then completed his doctoral thesis, Life, Liberty and Property, a survey of attitudes toward property in Akron, Ohio.
Read more about this topic: Alfred Winslow Jones
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“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
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“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
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