“A society that chiefly esteems order, that finds growth painful and change disturbing, inevitably seeks for a fixed body of superior truths upon which it may depend. It looks backward, to something already in existence, for the source and sanction of truth. It falls back upon what is antecedent, prior, original, a priori, for assurance. […]
“‘To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all. I have not the years.’” ––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 236 “Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means a certain kind of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative […]
“Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its operation is […]
“The exhausted swimmer, struggling to reach shore, isn’t worried about starving to death afterwards.” ––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 135 “To respect matter means to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions which hinder and obstruct and which have to be changed, conditions which help and further and which can be used to modify […]
“The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater simplicity, uniformity and unity among phenomena than actually exists. It follows superficial analogies and jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of details and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a web of purely internal origin which it imposes upon nature. What had been termed science in […]
“If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a reasonable hypothesis the idea that philosophy originated not out of intellectual material, but out of social and emotional material, it will also succeed in leaving with you a changed attitude toward traditional philosophies. They will be viewed from a new angle and placed in […]
“Just as this separation of some things as ends-in-themselves from other things as means-in-themselves, by their very nature, is a heritage of an age in which only those activities were called ‘useful’ which served living physiologically rather than morally, and which were carried on by slaves or serfs to serve men who were free in […]
“Having some kind of System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.” ––The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 886
“To be hanged by the neck until dead is one thing; but to be forced to listen to a reading from the Old Testament twice, why, that is not only Unusual but Cruel.” ––The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 834
“‘The law is,’ he bellowed, ‘that thou shalt return from hence, to the Place whence thou camest, and from thence to Tyburn Cross, where thou shalt hang by the neck, but not unto Death; that thou shalt thereafter be drawn and quartered, till the body be Dead! Dead! Dead! And the Lord have Mercy upon […]