philosophy

"I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first reading of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the to…"

"It was not until the Twelfth Century of our era that the Pentateuch as a whole was subjected to rational scrutiny. The man who undertook the ungrateful task was a learned Spanish rabbi, Abraham ben Me…"

"Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators ar…"

"The new energy affects everyone — Everyone is being affected by the new energy pouring into the world. Those who believed in political, religious and philosophical systems have become disillusioned be…"

"Let us contemplate two epochal events in the long human story. One is the annunciation of the unity of God at Mt. Sinai. That same God was said to have made man, alone among living beings, in His imag…"

"I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to emphasise what I think is an important aspect of the story, namely the fact that it is realistic, in …"

"I just want you to know I’m not a pedophile. … Maybe the only thing worse than being called a pedophile is being called a hedge fund manager."

"he Question in dispute between the King's Party and us being, as I apprehended, Whether the King should govern as a God by his Will, and the Nation be governed by Force like Beasts: or whether the Peo…"

"We can have as many meetings as we like, but the will to change is nowhere in sight. Society must start treating this as a crisis...On Thursday 20 August, it will be exactly two years since the first …"

"Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy — anarchism minus Marxism — will be free to get better at being what it is."

"The philosophy of the soul of my people appears to me as an expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of conflict between what the world is…"

"The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to …"

"Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and incr…"

"were told that love - indiscriminate love for one's fellow man - is the highest virtue, and they obeyed. They were told that the merging of one's self with a herd, tribe, or community is the noblest w…"

"The world is everything that is the case, and what the case is is not a matter of logic."

"We tread on unsure ground, theologically. The doctrines are still in the malleable state; what eventually evolves from them will owe its existence not to pre-eminent merit, but to the shrewdness of th…"

"Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise and with a greater likelihood of being found in every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, man has …"

"The Soviet Union is dead and gone and replaced by the Russian Federation, which is a country we can be friends with now, thank God — and we want the Russians to prosper, and should help the Russians p…"

"Still we are not positive that if neither destroyed by enemies nor famine they would increase too much; because for aught we known the fecundity is only great because the destruction is great; instead…"

"I know you want to study me psychologically. That's reasonable and I appreciate it. At least you don't lecture to me and pry into my affairs. You have a good technique as a psychiatrist. Let the other…"