Anoop Verma's Diary: Itihasa & Darshana

A blog dedicated to philosophy, history, politics, literature

Wednesday, 26 December 2018

Paul Guyer's Thoughts On Kant as a Stoic

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“Hinduism, which is the most skeptical and the most believing of all, the most skeptical because it has questioned and experimented the most, the most believing because it has the deepest experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge, that wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of dogmas but a law of life, which is not a social framework but the spirit of a past and [future]] social evolution, which rejects nothing but insists on testing and experiencing everything and when tested and experienced, turning in to the soul's uses, in this Hinduism, we find the basis of future world religion.” ~ Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo
“When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta.” ~ Sri Aurobindo

My Blogs

  • The Itihasa & The Darshana
    China Chose Order Over Freedom—And Prospered. Should India Rethink Its Path? - Can freedom survive without order? Increasingly, the answer appears to be no. Liberty without structure is fragile. It fractures under pressure, degenera...
  • The Darshana & The Itihasa
    China Chose Order Over Freedom—And Prospered. Should India Rethink Its Path? - Can freedom survive without order? Increasingly, the answer appears to be no. Liberty without structure is fragile. It fractures under pressure, degenera...
“The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and out of old religious scruples, stood aside. It was the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence; and it is this—more even than religion now — that at the end of the twentieth century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries. India, with an intelligentsia that grows by leaps and bounds, expands in all directions. Pakistan, proclaiming only the faith and then proclaiming the faith again, ever shrinks.” ~ V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul

Myself

Myself
Philosophers fall into two kinds: those who preach the truth and those who seek it. I belong to the latter — I am a seeker.
"The great Aryan Nation is said, at the present moment, to be a dying race not because its numbers are dwindling but because it is completely disorganized. Individually, man to man, second to none on earth in intellect and physique, possessing a code of morality unapproachable by any other race of humanity, the Hindu Nation is still helpless on account of its manifold divisions and selfishness.” ~ Swami Shraddhanand
“India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India’s spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilizational matrix is being digested into western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential.” ~ Rajiv Malhotra
“India in the late twentieth century still seems so much itself, so rooted in its own civilization, it takes time to understand that its independence has meant more than the going away of the British; that the India to which Independence came was a land of far older defeat.” ~ V. S. Naipaul

Sardar Patel

Sardar Patel
“The Hindu sentiment in regard to the Somnath temple is both strong and widespread… it is unlikely that this sentiment will be satisfied by mere restoration of the temple or by prolonging its life. The restoration of the idol would be the point of honor and sentiments with the Hindu public.” ~ Sardar Patel
“Hindus accept no divisions between the believer and unbeliever. Every path leads to Him (God or Reality); there can be as many paths to Him as the number of human. Indeed, the prophetic tradition is alien to Hinduism. Narrowness of the spirit, peculiar to Semitic faiths, has been alien to India.” ~ Girilal Jain

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Nirad C. Chaudhuri
“In the south the temples have survived, and in the north they have not. Over seven centuries from the eleventh to the end of the seventeenth all the great cities of northern India dating from Hindu times were sacked by the Muslim invaders and conquerors of India. All the temples there and in all other centres of Hinduism were systematically destroyed. None were left standing at Ujjain, Ajmere, Delhi, Mathura, Brindaban, Kanauj, Prayag, or Benares—which were the centres of the political, cultural, and religious life of the Hindus. In most of these places mosques were built on the sites of the temples, and in some with pillars taken from them. This religious vandalism also worked its fury on the Buddhist centres. Moreover, it was not simply that the great temples in the cities were destroyed; so were the village temples. For most of the period of Muslim rule, there was a ban on building new temples and rebuilding the old in the regions the Muslims controlled.” ~ Nirad C. Chaudhuri
“I do not regard Jainism or Buddhism as separate from Hinduism. Hinduism believes in the oneness not of merely all human life but in the oneness of all that lives.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“The Rig-Veda, the first of the Vedas, is probably the earliest book that humanity possesses. In it we find the first outpourings of the human mind, the glow of poetry, the rapture at nature's loveliness and mystery.” ~ Jawaharlal Nehru
“The moral ideal, that when slapped on one cheek you should offer the other for a slap, has no place in politics. Here the maxim is just the reverse. If you are slapped, give proper return, and you would at once find a desire by the other side to make friends. The method of offering the other cheek for being slapped has now been tried for over 20 years. There has been enough of coaxing and fawning, which by giving undue importance to the other community has begotten only insolence and impudence. May we not now try the counter method and see its result?” ~ Rai Bahadur Lalchand
“Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers; a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements.” ~ Jonathan Barnes
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead
“Aristotle came from the very edge of the Greek world. He was a Greek to the last fiber of his being, yet he remained the aloof, impartial observer, not deeply implicated in the struggles of that world.” ~ John Herman Randall, Jr.
"I saw the Master there of those who know,
Amid the philosophic family,
By all admired, and by all reverenced;
There Plato too I saw, and Socrates,
Who stood beside him closer than the rest." ~ Dante

Plato

Plato
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead
“New Guineans… impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners.” ~ Jared Diamond
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” ~ Goethe
“Only barbarians feel no curiosity about the sources of their own forms of life and civilization, their place in the world order as determined by the antecedent experiences of their ancestors, as well as the very identity of these ancestors, which alone can give a sense of identity to their successors.” ~ Isaiah Berlin
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures." ~ Shakespeare

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and more enduringly reflection is occupied with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” ~ Immanuel Kant
"Within twelve months Greece had lost her greatest ruler [Alexander], her greatest orator [Demosthenes], and her greatest philosopher [Aristotle]. The glory that had been Greece faded now in the dawn of the Roman sun; and the grandeur that was Rome was the pomp of power rather than the light of thought. Then that grandeur too decayed, that little light went almost out. For a thousand years darkness brooded over the face of Europe. All the world awaited the resurrection of philosophy." ~ Will Durant

Hegel

Hegel
“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” ~ Hegel
"Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." ~ Shakespeare
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.” ~ Nietzsche
“The era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.” ~ Albert Camus
"Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man." ~ David Hume
“It is a poor mind that will think with the multitude because it is a multitude: truth is not altered by the opinions of the vulgar or the confirmation of the many. It is more blessed to be wise in truth in face of opinion than to be wise in opinion in face of truth.” ~ Giordano Bruno
"It is a flat truism that all attempts to deal with philosophical problems from the point of view, or with the method, of any other discipline will inevitably result in the destruction of philosophy itself." ~ Etienne Gilson
"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning." ~ Louis L'Amour
“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote
“Political and civic freedom remains eternally the most sacred of all things, the most deserving aim of all effort, the great center of all culture; but this wondrous structure can only be built on the solid foundation of an ennobled character. One has to begin with the creation of the citizens for a constitution, before these citizens can be granted a constitution.” ~ Friedrich Schiller
“I admit that the exercises of the gymnasium form athletic bodies; but beauty is only developed by the free and equal play of the limbs. In the same way the tension of the isolated spiritual forces may make extraordinary men; but it is only the well−tempered equilibrium of these forces that can produce happy and accomplished men.” ~ Friedrich Schiller

“The dogmatist is a more serious character than the utter skeptic. He is the dictator of cognition. He will put you down by main force. And he is no myth.” ~ Stephen C. Pepper
“You know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the intention merely of refuting them, but that in thinking them over I always weave them into my judgments, and af­ford them the opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs. I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impartially from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my previous insight may be obtainable.” ~ Immanuel Kant
“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, nor an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer... with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.” ~ Sigmund Freud
"For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise." ~ Benjamin Franklin
“Science is knowledge of proximate causes (physics, mathematics, economics, etc.). Wisdom is knowledge of ultimate causes—metaphysics in the natural order, theology in the supernatural order. Prudence is right reason about something to be done. Art is right reason about something to be made.” Sister Miriam Joseph
“The age at which we obtain the complete use of reason may be determined as follows: [i] as far as the facility (to use it competently to achieve any goal) is concerned it is approximately the twentieth year, [ii] as far as calculation (to use other human beings for one's own purposes) is concerned, it is the fortieth year, and [iii] the age of wisdom be¬ gins around sixty. The latter age is entirely negative. We are finally able to recognize all the foolish mistakes we made in the first two.” ~ Immanuel Kant

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“Where Plato is whimsical and ironic, and proceeds by suggestion and indirection, Aristotle is matter-of-fact, almost pedestrian. Where Plato’s writing is filled with his sense of better and more beautiful world behind, above, beyond the world of ordinary experience, illuminating that experience but transcending it, Aristotle keeps his feet firm on the ground of ordinary experience. This is Aristotle's reality, and the business of philosophy in his view is to make sense of the here and now.” ~ W. T. Jones
"The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word "enthusiasm"—en theos—a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within—an ideal of beauty and who obeys it, an ideal of art, of science. All are lighted by reflection from the infinite." ~ Louis Pasteur
"It is not legitimate to identify the ends of Fascism with the ends of Russian communism. The first represents the exaltation of the executioner by the executioner; the second, more dramatic in concept, the exaltation of the executioner by the victim. The former never dreamed of liberating all men, but only of liberating a few by subjugating the rest. The latter, in its most profound principle, aims at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all." ~ Albert Camus

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Griffith Ralph Waldo Emerson Ram Mohan Roy Ram Naik Ram Swarup Ramachandra Guha Ramakrishna Paramahansa Ramchandra Kak Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar' Rana Ayyub Ranbir Kapoor Randolph Churchill Rani Lakshmibai Ranjit Singh Rashid al-Din Sinan Ray Monk Raymond III Raymond IV Raymond Queneau Reginald Earle Welby Reginald Heber Reginald Reynold Reginald Reynolds Rembrandt Reynald of Châtillon Reza Shah Pahlavi Ribbentrop Richard D. McKirahan Richard E. Grimm Richard Erdoes Richard Garbe Richard Hofstadter Richard Irving Dodge Richard Lionheart Richard Rorty Rishi Dīrghatamas Robert Boyle Robert Burns Robert C. Davis Robert Clive Robert de Nobili Robert E. Howard Robert Ernest Hume Robert Gusicard Robert H. Bork Robert Ingersoll Robert J Hanlon Robert Livingston Robert Napier Robert Nozick Robert Wright Robespierre Rodney J. Payton Roger Bacon Roger Bissell Roger Borsa Roger de Flor Roger of Howden Roger of Wendover Roger Scruton Romanos IV Diogenes Romesh Chunder Dutt Romila Thapar Romulus Augustulus Ronald Reagan Roosevelt Ross Coggins Rousseau Roxana Rudyard Kipling Rumi Sabyasachi Bhattacharya Sadashivrao Bhau Saddam Hussain Sage Kapila Saif Ali Khan Saint Antony the Great Saladin Sally Hemings Salman Rushdie Samuel P. Huntington Sankara Misra Santayana Sarat Chandra Bose Saray Mulk Khanum Sardar Patel Sarvepalli Gopal Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Satischandra Chatterjee Saul Bellow Sayana Sayyid Qutb Schopenhauer Schrödinger Schwarzenegger Seleucus I Nicator Selim I Seneca Seneca the Elder Seymour Hersh Shah Alam II Shah Bano Shah Ismail Shah Jahan Shah Rukh Khan Shah Tahmasp Shah Waliullah Dehlawi Shakespeare Shankara Shankaracharya Shapur II Shaukat Ali Shawar Shehbaz Sharif Sheikh Abdullah Sheikh Mujib Sheldon Pollock Sheroo Marri Shinzo Abe Shirkuh Shivaji Shriharsha Sibylla of Jerusalem Siddharth Varadarajan Sidney Sheldon Sidney Webb Simon Coleman Simone de Beauvoir Simplicius Sir Arthur Harris Sir Horatio Nelson Siraj-ud-Daulah Sister Nivedita Sita Ram Goel Slobodan Milošević Socrates Solzhenitsyn Somananda Somerset Maugham Soong Mei-ling Sorghaghtani Beki Sosigenes of Alexandria Spinoza Sri Aurobindo Sriharṣa St John Philby St. Jerome Stalin Stateira II Stephanie W. Jamison Stephen C. Pepper Stephen Greenblatt Stephen H. Phillips Steven Pinker Steven Runciman Subhas Chandra Bose Subramanian Swamy Suleiman the Magnificent Svetaketu Swami Shraddhanand Syama Prasad Mookerjee Syed Ahmad Barelvi Syed Shahabuddin Sylvester Stallone T S Elliot T. N. Madan T. S. Elliot Tacitus Talaat Pasha Tamerlane Tarek Fateh Teb Tengeri Tennyson Thales Thatcher Themistocles Theodor Aufrecht Theodor Mommsen Theodore Roosevelt Theophrastus Theramenes Thomas Aquinas Thomas Carlyle Thomas Hobbes Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kuhn Thomas More Thomas Sowell Thomas Wizenmann Thrasybulus Thucydides Tigranes the Great Timaeus of Tauromenium Timoleon Timur Kuran Tipu Sultan Tissaphernes Titu Mir Titus Tom Hanks Toni Morrison Toussaint Louverture Trajan Trotsky Truman Trump Tuanku Imam Bonjol Tughril Beg U. N. Mukerji Uddalaka Aruni Ulrich Mammitzsch Uma Haimavati Umberto Eco Umdat ul-Umara Urban II Utpal Dutt Utpaladeva V D Savarkar Vacaspati Misra Valentinian III Valerie Roebuck Valmiki Vasco da Gama Vasugupta Vātsyāyana Venkat Dhulipala Vespasian Victor Davis Hanson Victor Hugo Vijayalakshmi Pandit Vikram Sampath Vincent van Gogh Violet Asquith Virgil Virginia Woolf Vissarion Belinsky Vivek Agnihotri Vivekananda Vladimir Nabokov Voltaire Vossug ed Dowleh Vyasa W C Bonnerjee W E H Lecky W. D. Ross W. K. C. Guthrie W. T. Stace Wagner Walter Benjamin Walter Kaufmann Walter M. Miller Walter Nicgorski Walter of Brienne Warren Dockter Warren Hastings Washington Irving Wendell Willkie Wendy Doniger Whittaker Chambers Wilfred Cantwell Smith Will Smith William Amherst William Blake William Burke William Carey William Dalrymple William F. Buckley William Faulkner William Gibson William Golding William James William Jones William Knox D’Arcy William of Chastelneuf William of Moerbeke William of Rubruck William Pitt the Younger William Randolph Hearst William the Conqueror William Wedderburn Winston Churchill Wittgenstein Woodrow Wilson Xanthippe Xenophanes Xenophon Xerxes Xi Jinping Xonophanes Yahya Khan Yajnavalkya Yaska Yazdegerd III Yeats Yoram Hazony Zengi Zeno of Citium Zhou Enlai Zia-ul-Haq Zinoviev Zoroaster
"Imagination, feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land."

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"When two or more independent insights cross a new philosophy is born." ~ Henri Bergson
"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.” ~ Oscar. Wilde

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing" ~ W. Edwards Deming
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." ~ Samuel Johnson
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." ~ Immanuel Kant
"The greatest thing on earth is to know how to belong to oneself. Everyone looks in front of them. But I look inside myself. I have no concerns but my own. I constantly reflect on myself; I control myself; I taste myself. We owe some things to society, but the greater part of ourselves." ~ Michel de Montaigne
"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed." ~ Marcus Aurelius
“When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists. We are lucky, indeed, if the needless bureaucrats are mere easygoing loafers. They are more likely today to be energetic reformers busily discouraging and disrupting production.” ~ Henry Hazlitt
"I have received, sir, your new book against the human race, and I thank you for it. No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go about all fours." ~ Voltaire
"But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." ~ George Orwell
“I much prefer that my own style be my own, uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else’s, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but one that, deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect.” ~ Francesco Petrarch
"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, — and all it wants, — is the liberty of appearing." ~ Thomas Paine

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“It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank–to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning,–it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.–The noble soul has reverence for itself.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." ~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

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"To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed." ~ Louis L'Amour
"Many among the intelligentsia see themselves as agents of “change,” a term often used loosely, almost generically, as if things are so bad that “change” can be presupposed to be a change for the better. The history of changes that turned out to be for the worse, even in countries that were pretty bad to begin with—czarist Russia or Cuba under Batista, for example—receives remarkably little attention.” ~ Thomas Sowell
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." ~ Denis Diderot
"You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business agent who handles your money, for a job." ~ Jack London
"Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."" ~ Eric Hoffer
“It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their attention, supposing it to be new.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
"They forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the Eternal City, ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of personal freedom and dream of a strange freedom of the species; reject solitary death and give the name of immortality to a vast collective agony. They no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man." ~ Albert Camus
"These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth." ~ Edmund Burke
“The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.” ~ Samuel P. Huntington
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." ~ Claude Adrien Helvétius
“The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“Social evils cannot be reformed by legislation; defects of government machinery cannot be repaired by changes in the constitution; differences of opinion cannot be settled by compromise.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." ~ George Santayana

"One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"In National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The quest for the origin must take into account that the world of our experience is not a static structure but a process; and the speculation on the origin must project (in one symbolism or another) this experience into a process in the origin itself.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.” ~ Jacob Bronowski

“You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start.” ~ Ayn Rand

“Can you be a conservative and believe in God? Obviously. Can you be a conservative and not believe in God? This is an empirical essay, and so the answer is, as obviously, yes. Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in him? I would say no.” ~ William F. Buckley Jr.

“The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their "nature" is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.” ~ Hannah Arendt
“Carefree, mocking, violent–this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior.” ~ Nietzsche

“Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.” ~ Nietzsche

“Hubris characterizes our attitude towards ourselves,–for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals, we merrily vivisect our souls out of curiosity: that is how much we care about the ‘salvation’ of the soul!” ~ Nietzsche

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ~ James Joyce
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn...
~ Shelly
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." ~ Samuel P. Huntington
“Every dead language, such as Latin, was at one time a living common language. It may be serviceable for special uses, such as liturgy or doctrine, from the very fact that it is a dead language and, therefore, not subject to changes or to a variety of interpretations as a living language is. A dead language is more likely to be understood in exactly the same way in all times and places.” ~ Sister Miriam Joseph
“The development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.” ~ Erich Fromm
“If you see a man undaunted in danger, untouched by passion, happy in adversity, calm in the raging storm, viewing mankind from a higher level and the gods from their own, will you not be moved by veneration?” -Seneca
“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
“Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It's as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. so when I'm observing that's what I'm watching for. The choices people make” ~ Louise Penny
"Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. When some cultures have achieved much greater prosperity, better health, longer life, more advanced technology, more stable government, and greater personal safety than others, has all this been just coincidence?" ~ Thomas Sowell
"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper." ~ George Orwell
"Now that I have laid down the true principles of political right, and tried to plant the state on its own base, the next task would be to strengthen it by its foreign relations. That would bring in the law of nations, commerce, the right of war and conquest, public law, leagues, negotiations, treaties, etc. But all this adds up to a new subject that is far too vast for my narrow scope. As it is, I have ranged further afield than I ought to have.” ~ Rousseau
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." ~ Eric Hoffer
“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.” ~ Voltaire
“To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.” ~ Oscar Wilde
"Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.” ~ Eric Hoffer
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.” ~ Victor Hugo
“History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.” ~ Jared Diamond
“The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” ~ Cecil Rhodes
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~ Tolstoy
"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do not bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear." ~ Victor Hugo
"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." ~ Blaise Pascal
"Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.” ~ Schopenhauer
“The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
"What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think." ~ Louis L'Amour
"The blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction was the Great War of 1914—18. It was called great on account of its size rather than for any notable merit. When its sequel broke out in 1940, the earlier conflict was renamed First World War in deference to the second. This was an error, since the European wars of the 18C were also world wars, promiscuously fought in India and North America and on the five seas." ~ Jacques Barzun
"Such masters, such scholars. Who ever dreamt of Voltaire and Rousseau as legislators? The first has the merit of writing agreeably; and nobody has ever united blasphemy and obscenity so happily together. The other was not a little deranged in his intellects, to my almost certain knowledge. But he saw things in bold and uncommon lights, and he was very eloquent.” ~ Edmund Burke
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.” ~ H. L. Mencken
“The genius of men like Newton and Einstein lies in that: they ask transparent, innocent questions which turn out to have catastrophic answers.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
"The quarrel between Hume and Rousseau is symbolic: Rousseau was mad but influential, Hume was sane but had no followers." ~ Bertrand Russell
“The Greeks have bequeathed to us two figures, whose real or mythical lives conform to these two notions—Plato and Ulysses. The one shares Reason with the Gods, the other shares it with the foxes.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead
"Nietzsche has the distinction of being the only philosopher who ever has been considered the major cause of a world war." ~ Eric Voegelin
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