
The members of Christ, many though they be, are bound to one another by the ties of charity and peace under the one Head, who is our Saviour Himself, and form one man. Often their voice is heard in the Psalms as the voice of one man; the cry of one is as the cry of all, for all are one in One.
Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.
If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
It seems that it was the Jews who had entered the revolutionary movement who are primarily responsible for the terroristic measures blamed upon the bolsheviks. This hypothesis appears to me to be all the more reasonable given that the intervention of the Jews in the Hungarian Soviet Republic has not been a happy one.
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.
So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premisses which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary.
Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.
A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ...Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
The foundations on which several duties are built, and the foundations of right and wrong from which they spring, are not perhaps easily to be let into the minds of grown men, not us'd to abstract their thoughts from common received opinions. Much less are children capable of reasonings from remote principles. They cannot conceive the force of long deductions. The reasons that move them must be obvious, and level to their thoughts, and such as may be felt and touched. But yet, if their age, temper, and inclination be consider'd, they will never want such motives as may be sufficient to convince them.
Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.
The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual ... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. Representation of the Intellectual
Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.
Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.
We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.
There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it - fragmentary and uncertain though it is - that distinguishes man from all other animals.
[on Epicurus] His starting point is a conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure - though not necessarily sensual pleasure - is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action. "Nature leads every organism to prefer its own good to every other good" - even the stoic finds a subtle pleasure in renunciation. "We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them". Epicurus, then, is no epicurean, he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quite and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia - tranquility, equaninimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno's "Apathy"
They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.
The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
Sartre observed that he had never felt so free as during the German occupation when (as a member of the French resistance) he was in constant danger of being arrested and shot. Could there be a more conclusive proof that human beings are freer than they realize, and that their freedom is eroded by habit and laziness?
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.
The conception of Rights involves that when men are to live in a community, each must so restrict his freedom as to permit the coexistence of the freedom of all others. But it does not involve that this particular person, A, is to restrict his freedom by the freedom of those particular persons, B, C, and D. That it has happened so that I, A, must conform myself particularly to the freedom of these, B, C, and D, of all other men, is purely the result of my living together with them; and I so live with them, simply by my free-will, not because there is an obligation for me to do so.
This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere-that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
I can be twenty women, one hundred, if that's what you want, all women. Ride with me behind you, I weigh nothing, your horse will not feel me. I want to be your whorehouse!
When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well-put is half-solved.
If the room is smoky, if only moderately, I will stay; if there is too much smoke I will go. Remember this, keep a firm hold on it, the door is always open.
Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.
Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.
The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood. Every moment is a gaping abyss. Gaze on the dark sea without staggering, confront the abyss every moment without illusion or impudence or fear. ... But this is not enough; take a further step: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.
There is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality.
It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God. If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.
The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is divine meaning in the life of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and of me. Creation happens to us, burns itself into us, recasts us in burning - we tremble and are faint, we submit. We take part in creation, meet the Creator, reach out to Him, helpers and companions.
For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
In the end, I am moved by causes and ideas that I can actually choose to support because they conform to values and principles that I believe in.
I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.The primary, or earliest, class of human pleasure is the pleasures of external senses.In addition to these, man is susceptible of certain secondary pleasures, as the pleasures of intellectual feeling, the pleasures of sympathy, and the pleasures of self-approbation. The secondary pleasures are probably more exquisite than the primary; Or, at least,The most desirable state of man is that in which he has access to all these sources of pleasure, and is in possession of a happiness the most varied and uninterrupted. This state is a state of high civilization.
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, - that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.
Your god is too small.
Everyone is sure of this [that errors are normally distributed], Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians that it is an experimentally determined fact.
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