
Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, [he would] not [have tasted] death.
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.
It is satisfaction to a man to do the proper works of a man.
My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth telling... [W]ho is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power. ...[W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the 'critical' tradition in the West.
Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.
The real sin - perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission - is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal - that is, a heretic - is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.
It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. A State is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and dis-establish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern State claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats.
And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
If there are different Notions of the science of Philosophy, it is the true Notion alone that puts us in a position to understand the writings of philosophers who have worked in the knowledge of it. For in thought, and particularly in speculative thought, comprehension means something quite different from understanding the grammatical sense of the words alone, and also from understanding them in the region of ordinary conception only. Hence we may possess a knowledge of the assertions, propositions, or of the opinions of philosophers; we may have occupied ourselves largely with the grounds of and deductions from these opinions, and the main point in all that we have done may be wanting - the comprehension of the propositions.
The statesman who should attempt to direct people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.
What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.
Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.
It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.
The free will, the actual motor of reason in society, necessarily creates wrong. The individual must clash with the social order that claims to represent his own will in its objective form. But the wrong and the 'avenging justice' that remedies it not only expresses a 'higher logical necessity,' but also prepare the transition to a higher social form of freedom, the transition from abstract right to morality. For, in committing a wrong, and in accepting punishment for his deed, the individual becomes conscious of the 'infinite subjectivity' of his freedom. He learns that he is free only as a private person.
To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.
If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root drives into the depths, then it seems to me that the impetus of the root.
France wanted to make proselytes to her opinions, and turn every government in the world into a republic. If every government was against her, it was because she had declared herself hostile to every government. He knew of nothing to which this strange republic could be compared, but to the system of Mahomet, who with the koran in one hand, and a sword in the other, held out the former to the acceptance of mankind, and with the latter compelled them to adopt it as their creed. The koran which France held out, was the declaration of the rights of man and universal fraternity; and with the sword she was determined to propagate her doctrines, and conquer those whom she could not convince.
Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
Eh bien, continuons... Well, let's get on with it.
This is our epoch, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor - we did not choose it. This is our epoch, the air we breathe, the mud given us, the bread, the fire, the spirit! Let us accept Necessity courageously. It is our lot to have fallen on fighting times. Let us tighten our belts, let us arm our hearts, our minds, and our bodies. Let us take our place in battle!
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
To sum up: we have seen that of the three notions of 'partial interpretation' discussed, each is either unsuitable for Carnap's purposes (starting with observation terms), or incompatible with a rather minimal scientific realism; and, in addition, the second notion depends upon gross and misleading changes in our use of language. Thus in none of these senses is 'a partially interpreted calculus in which only the observation terms are directly interpreted' an acceptable model for a scientific theory.
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.
You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.
The capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers.
If an action ... involves little profit but much righteousness, do it.
Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.
All urgent calls he shall hear at once, but never put off; for when postponed, they will prove too hard or impossible to accomplish.
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.
Christ speaks of two debtors, one of whom owed much and the other little, and who both found forgiveness. He asks: Which of these two ought to love more? The answer: The one who has forgiven much. When you love much, you are forgiven much-and when you are forgiven much, you love much. See here the blessed recurrence of salvation in love!
For the time being, the ominous peril of the communist parties in the West lies in their stand on foreign affairs. The distinctive mark of all present-day communist parties is their devotion to the aggressive foreign policy of the Soviets. Whenever they must choose between Russia and their own country, they do not hesitate to prefer Russia. Their principle is: Right or wrong, my Russia. They strictly obey all orders issued from Moscow. When Russia was an ally of Hitler, the French communists sabotaged their own country's war effort and the American communists passionately opposed President Roosevelt's plans to aid England and France in their struggle against the Nazis.
I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that which believed itself in the ascendant.
The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A being that is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing. Variant translation: Now slavery has a certain likeness to death, hence it is also called civil death. For life is most evident in a thing's moving itself, while what can only be moved by another, seems to be as if dead. But it is manifest that a slave is not moved by himself, but only at his master's command.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.
He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.
Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery."
For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?
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