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“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” — James Madison, Federalist 47.”
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“The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
― The Nicomachean Ethics
― The Nicomachean Ethics
“... in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs.”
― From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
― From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
“Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.”
― Themes and Variations
― Themes and Variations
“The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.”
― Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
― Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
Political Philosophy and Ethics
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Study and discussion of the important questions of ethical and political philosophy from Confucius and Socrates to the present. Rules (see also the ...more
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