Abby Stein

“But the relationship between the between the two cultural paradigms has always been a dialectical, not cyclical. The romantics were not repeating their ancestors. On the contrary, they brought about a cultural revolution comparable in its radicalism and effects with the roughly contemporary American, French, and Industrial Revolutions.
By destroying natural law and by reorienting concern from the work to the artist they tore up the old regime's aesthetic rule book just as thoroughly as any Jacobin [a 18th century political French club] tore down social institutions. In the words of Ernst Troeltsch: "Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity." [Unquote Troeltsch]
As will be argued in the subsequent chapters, it was Hegel who captured the essence of this revolution in his pithy definition of romanticism as "absolute inwardness" [absloute Innerlichkeit - in German - אינערליכקייט]. It will also be argued that its prophet was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: if not the most consistent, then certainly the most influential of all the eighteenth-century thinkers.
Writing in 1907, Lytton Strachey caught Rousseau's special quality very well: "Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world -- to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart." Percy Bysshe Shelley, who derided the philosophes as "mere reasoners," regarded Rousseau as "a great poet.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution

“Muslim fundamentalism, by contrast, has often-though again, not always-segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianity but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to modernity.”
― Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

“How do you think the world popped into existence? - I'd say wee we are at least five Albert Einsteins away from answering this question.”
― Martin Amis

“But when the Jews, while in subjection to the kings of Babylon and later the kings of Syria, wanted to remain steadfast in not giving recognition to any other god but their own (think about Haman’s arguments in the Book of Esther), their refusal, seen as rebellion against the victor, brought them the persecutions we read in their history, and of which there is no other precedent prior to Christianity.”
“Since this new idea of an otherworldly kingdom (-that Jesus speaks about) had never entered to head of the pagans, they always regarded Christianity as true rebels who, underneath their hypothetical submission, were only waiting for the moment when they would become independent and the masters, and adroitly they pretended in their weakness to respect. This is the reason for the persecution.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract