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The first word of the sentence is also the first word in our Constitution, drafted eleven years later, which begins, “We the people…” That phrase, We the people, is as profound as it is simple. Our governance is based not on the divine
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“The final words of Bergson’s 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion could have been written today: “Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining whether they want to go on living or not.”
― Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People
― Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People
“appalled by nationalism, they disavowed national history, as nationalism’s handmaiden. But when scholars stopped writing national history, other, less scrupulous people stepped in. Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of fiends and frauds willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to pour out the contents of old rubbish bags full of festering incitements, resentments, and calls to violence. When serious historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There’s only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.”
― This America: The Case for the Nation
― This America: The Case for the Nation
“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information”
― Common Sense
― Common Sense
“From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
― Parable of the Talents
― Parable of the Talents
“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they
make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful
wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.
And shall we not best guide humanity by
telling the truth about all this, so far as the
truth is ascertainable? —W. E. B. DuBois,
“The Propaganda of History,” 1935”
― This America: The Case for the Nation
make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful
wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.
And shall we not best guide humanity by
telling the truth about all this, so far as the
truth is ascertainable? —W. E. B. DuBois,
“The Propaganda of History,” 1935”
― This America: The Case for the Nation
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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