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Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 months 2 weeks ago
Take your fill….

Take your fill when the cask is first opened and when it is nearly spent, but midways be sparing: it is poor saving when you come to the lees.

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Line 5 This quote is often directly attributed to Seneca, but he is referring to lines 368-369 of Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, (translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)
Philosophical Maxims
Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne
6 months 1 week ago
There is no road or ready...

There is no road or ready way to virtue.

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Section 55
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 months 2 weeks ago
Socrates was ennobled by the hemlock...

Socrates was ennobled by the hemlock draught. Wrench from Cato's hand his sword, the vindicator of liberty, and you deprive him of the greatest share of his glory.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
7 months 6 days ago
Under the ideal measure of values...

Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

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Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 1, pg. 116.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
5 months 5 days ago
Men think it right to eat...

Men think it right to eat animals, because they are led to believe that God sanctions it. This is untrue. No matter in what books it may be written that it is not sinful to slay animals and to eat them, it is more clearly written in the heart of man than in any books that animals are to be pitied and should not be slain any more than human beings. We all know this if we do not choke the voice of our conscience.

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The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom (posthumous), Part I, International Book Publishing Company, New York, 1919, p. 68
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
5 months 4 weeks ago
The higher culture of the West-whose...

The higher culture of the West-whose moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values industrial society still professes-was a pre-technological culture in a functional as well as chronological sense. Its validity was derived from the experience of a world which no longer exists and which cannot be recaptured because it is in a strict sense invalidated by technological society. Moreover, it remained to a large degree a feudal culture, even when the bourgeois period gave it some of its most lasting formulations. It was feudal not only because of its confinement to privileged minorities, not only because of its inherent romantic element (which will be discussed presently), but also because its authentic works expressed a conscious, methodical alienation from the entire sphere of business and industry, and from its calculable and profitable order.

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p. 58
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
5 months 2 weeks ago
Food probably has a very great...

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

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A 14
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
3 months 3 days ago
Providence has already begun the punishment...

Providence has already begun the punishment of the guilty; more than sixty regicides, the most guilty among them, have already died a violent death.

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Chapter X, p. 97
Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
7 months 1 week ago
In principle and in practice, in...

In principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

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Ch. 1: Of the Principle of Utility
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
3 months 1 week ago
If the early Chinese people had...

If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government.

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p. 193
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 months 3 weeks ago
A great soul, any sincere soul,...

A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,-alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure-Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
6 months 5 days ago
Humanity may endure the loss of...

Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity; - all but the possibility of improvement.

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"The Vocation of the Scholar" (1794), as translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
3 months 3 weeks ago
Ever since prehistoric antiquity one field...

Ever since prehistoric antiquity one field of study after another has crossed the divide between what the historian might call its prehistory as a science and its history proper. These transitions to maturity have seldom been so sudden or so unequivocal as my necessarily schematic discussion may have implied. But neither have they been historically gradual, coextensive, that is to say, with the entire development of the fields within which they occurred.

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p. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6 months 6 days ago
A dream! What is a dream?...

A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times - but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness - that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

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Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
6 months 1 week ago
Animals and plants are living effects...

Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; this Nature ... is none other than God in things... Diverse living things represent diverse divinities and diverse powers, which, besides the absolute being they possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to their capacity and measure. Whence all of God is in all things (although not totally, but in some more abundantly and in others less) ... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.... To the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 months 2 weeks ago
Of all these experiences that seem...

Of all these experiences that seem so frightful, none is insuperable. Separate trials have been over- come by many: fire by Mucius, crucifixion by Regulus, poison by Socrates, exile by Rutilius, and a sword-inflicted death by Cato; therefore, let us also overcome something.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
7 months 1 week ago
Fools have a habit of believing...

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.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
5 months 2 weeks ago
Man should possess an infinite appetite...

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable. At present, because he is in a midway position between the brute and the truly human, he is always getting bored, depressed, weary of life. He has become so top-heavy with civilisation that he cannot contact the springs of pure vitality. Control of the prefrontal cortex will change all of this. He will cease to cast nostalgic glances towards the womb, for he will realise that death is no escape. Man is a creature of life and the daylight; his destiny lies in total objectivity.

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pp. 317-318
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
6 months 1 day ago
Unless man have a natural bent...

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

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IV
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 months 2 days ago
"Those who have forgotten where the...

"Those who have forgotten where the road leads." "They are at odds with what is all around them"-the all-directing logos. And "they find alien what they meet with every day."

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(Hays translation) IV, 46
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
5 months 4 weeks ago
It is not society's fault that...

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

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Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
5 months 2 weeks ago
It seemed perfectly possible that, in...

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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p. 67
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
7 months 1 week ago
Children should not be suffer'd to...

Children should not be suffer'd to lose the consideration of human nature in the shufflings of outward conditions. The more they have, the better humor'd they should be taught to be, and the more compassionate and gentle to those of their brethren who are placed lower, and have scantier portions. If they are suffer'd from their cradles to treat men ill and rudely, because, by their father's title, they think they have a little power over them, at best it is ill-bred; and if care be not taken, will by degrees nurse up their natural pride into an habitual contempt of those beneath them. And where will that probably end but in oppression and cruelty?

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Sec. 117
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
6 months 6 days ago
Every uneducated person…

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #63
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 months 5 days ago
Louisiana, as ceded by France to...

Louisiana, as ceded by France to the United States, is made a part of the United States; its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the United States, in analogous situations.

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Draft of proposed Amendment to the Constitution by Jefferson, who thought an amendment would be necessary to authorize the Louisiana Purchase to be incorporated into the United States
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
7 months 6 days ago
In the same year in which...

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both à priori and from my individual experience.

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(p. 10)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
7 months 1 week ago
The Virgin Mary remains in the...

The Virgin Mary remains in the middle between Christ and humankind. For in the very moment he was conceived and lived, he was full of grace. All other human beings are without grace, both in the first and second conception. But the Virgin Mary, though without grace in the first conception, was full of grace in the second ... whereas other human beings are conceived in sin, in soul as well as in body, and Christ was conceived without sin in soul as well as in body, the Virgin Mary was conceived in body without grace but in soul full of grace.

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As quoted in Anderson, H. George; Stafford, J. Francis; Burgess, Joseph A., eds. (1992). The One Mediator, The Saints, and Mary. Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue. VIII. Minneapolis: Augsburg. ISBN 0-8066-2579-1., p. 236
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
5 months 1 week ago
In principle and in practice...
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Main Content / General
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
5 months 1 week ago
Forgetting extermination is part of extermination,...

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that effect the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination-but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves.

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"Holocaust," p. 49
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is a conceded fact that...

It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
5 months 3 weeks ago
The man of flesh and bone;...

The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies-above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
6 months 2 days ago
Loneliness does not come from having...

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

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p.356
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
7 months 1 week ago
A propensity to hope and joy...

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

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Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
5 months 1 day ago
It is a very helpful insight...

It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
5 months 3 weeks ago
To its very core, the mind...

To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 74
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
4 months 3 weeks ago
The only medicine for suffering, crime,...

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
3 months 4 weeks ago
I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence...

I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence of those men's wits, that have received and held it to be true, and with the sprightliness of their judgments offered such violence to their own senses, as that they have been able to prefer that which their reason dictated to them, to that which sensible experiments represented most manifestly to the contrary. ...I cannot find any bounds for my admiration, how that reason was able in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make herself mistress of their credulity.

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Thomas Salusbury translation (1661) p. 301 as quoted by Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
8 months 6 days ago
Therefore create me! You, the most...

Therefore create me! You, the most esteemed, cultured public, are in possession of nervus rerum gerendarum [the moving force to accomplish something]. Just a word from you, a promise to purchase what I write, or, if it is possible, so that everything can be in order immediately, a little advance payment, and I am an author; I shall remain one as long as this favor lasts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
3 months 3 days ago
This makes me think that the...

This makes me think that the French Revolution is a great epoch and that its consequences, in all kinds of ways, will be felt far beyond the time of its explosion and the limits of its birthplace.

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Chapter II, p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
4 months 1 week ago
There is no social entity with...

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.

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Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
5 months 2 weeks ago
Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may...

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

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Ch. 7: "Relativity", p. 161
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
7 months 6 days ago
The governors of the world believe,...

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

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Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
6 months 1 week ago
Do not know the truth by...

Do not know the truth by the men, but know the truth, and then you will know who are truthful.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 29.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
4 months ago
One of the problems... both on...

One of the problems... both on the left and the right is that the... individual autonomy protected by liberalism tends to take more and more extreme versions... and... becomes self-undermining.

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13:24
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
5 months 2 weeks ago
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness...

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
7 months 1 week ago
His capital is continually going from...

His capital is continually going from him in one shape, and returning to him in another, and it is only by means of such circulation, or successive exchanges, that it can yield him any profit. Such capitals, therefore, may very properly be called circulating capitals.

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Chapter I, p. 305.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 months 5 days ago
If the debt which the banking...

If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air... We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of 'a public debt being a public blessing,' and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper.

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ME 13:423
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6 months 6 days ago
The best definition of man is:...

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.

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Part 1, Chapter 8 (tr. David Magarshack, 1950) The best definition of man is: a biped, ungrateful.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 months 5 days ago
The blazing evidence of immortality is...

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

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July 1855
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
4 months 4 weeks ago
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that...

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy, and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious, and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

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Philosophical Maxims
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