Allen Roberts’s Reviews > Unpopular Essays > Status Update

“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.” p. 82

“Old-fashioned people still say ‘bless you’ when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the reason for the custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out their souls, and before their souls could get back lurking demons were apt to enter the un-souled body; but if any one said ‘God bless you’, the demons were frightened off.” p. 62

“The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a special charm and mystical insight until 1921, when it was found that the expense of continuing to oppress them would be prohibitive.” p. 53

“After meditating for twelve years, [Kant] produced his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason; seven years later, at the age of sixty-four, he produced the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he resumed his dogmatic slumbers after nearly twenty years of uncomfortable wakefulness.” p. 46

“Philosophy has been defined as ‘an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly’; I should define it rather as ‘an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously’.” p. 43

“There are, of course, economic inequalities everywhere, but in a democratic regime they tend to diminish, whereas under an oligarchy they tend to increase. And wherever an oligarchy has power, economic inequalities threaten to become permanent owing to the modern impossibility of successful rebellion.” p. 40

“Dogmatism is an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy. In the present age, at least as much as in former times, it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness.” p. 31

“Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not
have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound.” p. 19

“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.” p. 19

“That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.” p. 17