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Expect Great Thin...
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The Social Princi...
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"Progressive Christianity?" Jun 26, 2026 06:33PM

 
Reasons and Persons
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"Sam Harris called this book a masterpiece." Jun 26, 2026 06:34PM

 
Book cover for Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
The fair seemed a consummate achievement of human idealism and beauty; the city—apart from its suburbs—an irresistible expression of materialism and uncouth power. How the one could have given birth to the other seemed a troubling paradox, ...more
Brad Lyerla
Fair and future
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James Madison
“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.”
James Madison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Rebecca Goldstein
“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.”
Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

“Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.”
Felix Frankfurter

Aristotle
“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.”
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

137714 Political Philosophy and Ethics — 6522 members — last activity Jul 28, 2026 01:11PM
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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