The Washington Literary Society and Debating Union (also known as "the Washington Society" or "the Wash") is a literary and debating group at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. While its current incarnation is modern, the society has roots back to the first decade of operation of the University and was founded in the mid-1830s.
The Washington Society operates under the constitution of the original Society and asserts its status as legitimate successor. The constitution, as it existed in 1929, required that the induction of new members be conducted by existing members. The refounding of the Society was made possible by Mr. R. E. Heischman of Charlottesville, an active member of the Washington Society from 1923 until 1925, who administered the oath of membership on the night of November 16.
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Famous quotes containing the words washington, literary, society, debating and/or union:
“Thou who, sinless, yet hast known
All of man’s infirmity!
Then, from Thine eternal throne,
Jesus, look with pitying eye.”
—George Washington Doane (1799–1859)
“In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.”
—Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves,—the union between themselves and the State,—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the same relation to the State that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)