"Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city."

-- Plato, The Republic

"After a generation of massive efforts to overhaul their country's constitution, Canadians have shifted gears and fallen back on older, quieter, less conflictual, and more piecemeal ways of adjusting and adapting their constitutional system... The bits and pieces of constitutional change that take place through normal constitutional politics will not produce a constitution that makes all Canadians happy. We Canadians do not have a single constitutional document in which we can all see the vision of the political community we want Canada to be or become. We know now that we cannot expect such a finish to our constitutional odyssey, for the simple reason that we do not share a common vision. The kind of constitutional patriotism we sought through the era of mega constitutional politics is beyond us. But what is not beyond Canadians is to experience another kind of constitutional patriotism, one that comes from realizing that it is through our engaging in the odyssey itself, not reaching its final destination — our continuing openness to working peacefully and creatively with the diversity and pluralism of our place and time — that we share a common civic identity and destiny."

-- Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People? (3rd ed.)

"What has happened in Bosnia must give pause to anyone who believes in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted. Though we have passed into a post-imperial age, we have not moved to a post-nationalist age, and I cannot see how we will ever do so. The cosmopolitan order of the great cities — London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris — depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state ...

"In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of individual nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens. In that sense alone, I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives. At the very least, cosmopolitan disdain and astonishment at the ferocity with which people will fight to win a nation-state of their own is misplaced. They are, after all, only fighting for a privilege cosmopolitans have long taken for granted."

-- Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism

"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order... which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage...

"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.""

-- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

 
Nha Trang, Vietnam,

"If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

"As a scientist it is perhaps inevitable that I should at certain points give the impression that traditional African thought is a poor shackled thing when compared with the thought of the sciences. Yet as a man, here I am living by choice in a still-heavily-traditional Africa rather than in the scientifically oriented Western subculture I was brought up in. Why? Well, there may be lots of queer, sinister, unacknowledged reasons. But one certain reason is the discovery of things lost at home. An intensely poetic quality in everyday life and thought, and a vivid enjoyment of the passing moment — both driven out of sophisticated Western life by the quest for purity of motive and the faith in progress."

-- Robin Horton, "African Traditional Thought and Western Science", in Rationality

"All in all this race of men seemed to us inferior to the Americans in knowledge, but superior in qualities of the heart. One had no sense here of that mercantile spirit which obtrudes in all the actions and sayings of an American. The Canadien's power of reasoning is little cultivated, but it is simple and straightforward; they undoubtedly have fewer ideas than their neighbors, but their sensibility seems more developed; theirs is a life of the heart, the others' of the head."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America

"We need to understand, however, that the ambition to provide an exhaustively rational warrant for the way in which we are to conduct our lives is misconceived. The pan-rationalist fantasy of demonstrating — from the ground up — how we have most reason to live is incoherent and must be abandoned. It is not the factual question about caring that misses the point, but the normative one. If we are to resolve our difficulties and hesitations in settling upon a way to live, what we need most fundamentally is not reasons or proofs. It is clarity and confidence. Coping with our troubled and restless uncertainty about how to live does not require us to discover what way of living can be justified by definitive argument. Rather, it requires us simply to understand what it is that we ourselves really care about, and to be decisively and robustly confident in caring about it."

-- Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love

"It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion."

-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

-- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count, and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

-- Albert Einstein

"The statesman understands that relations with the present enemy have special importance: war must be openly and publicly conducted in ways that prepare the enemy people for how they will be treated and that make a lasting and amicable peace possible. The fears or fantasies on the part of the enemy people that they will be subject to revenge or retaliation must be put to rest. Difficult though it may be, the present enemy must be seen as a future associate in a shared and just peace."

-- John Rawls, The Law of Peoples

Shanghai, China

"There are trivial truths and great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."

-- Niels Bohr

"Happiness, therefore, does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself. For, in a word, everything that we choose we choose for the sake of something else — except happiness, which is an end. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity."

-- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

"This first command of all duties to oneself is "know yourself," not in terms of your natural perfection but rather in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty. That is, know your heart — whether it is good or evil, whether the source of your actions is pure or impure, and what can be imputed to you as belonging originally to the substance of a human being or as derived and belonging to your moral condition.

"Moral cognition of oneself, which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one's heart which are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human wisdom. For in the case of a human being, the ultimate wisdom, which consists in the harmony of a being's will with its final end, requires him first to remove the obstacle within (an evil will actually present in him) and then to develop the original predisposition to a good will within him, which can never be lost. Only the descent into the hell of self-cognition can pave the way to godliness."

-- Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals

"[The] collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are."

-- Isaiah Berlin, "The Pursuit of the Ideal", The Crooked Timber of Humanity

"Because the math is really complicated people assume it must be right."

-- Nigel Goldenfeld, in "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street", The New York Times

"One other frequent error must be mentioned here. The illusion, namely, that love means necessarily the absence of conflict. Just as it is customary for people to believe that pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances, they believe that love means the absence of any conflict. And they find good reasons for this idea in the fact that the struggles around them seem only to be destructive interchanges which bring no good to either one of those concerned. But the reason for this lies in the fact that the "conflicts" of most people are actually attempts to avoid the real conflicts. They are disagreements on minor or superficial matters which by their very nature do not lend themselves to clarification or solution. Real conflicts between two people, those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength."

-- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"In a progressive country, change is constant; and the great question is not whether we should resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines."

-- Benjamin Disraeli, "Speech at Edinburgh on Reform Bill", October 1867

"Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours."

-- Jonathan Rauch, "Caring for Your Introvert", The Atlantic

"[I]n a secularized society that has learned to deal with its complexity consciously and deliberately, the communicative mastery of conflicts constitutes the sole source of solidarity among strangers — strangers who renounce violence and, in the cooperative regulation of their common life, also concede one another the right to remain strangers."

-- Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

"Through the power of a decisive motivation the act proceeds from the fulness of life into finite one-sidedness. No matter how it may have been arrived at, it still expresses only a part of our essence. Potentialities that are contained in this essence are annihilated through the act. Thus the act separates itself from the background of a life context. And without explanation of how circumstances, end, means, and life context are connected in it, it allows no comprehensive determination of the inner realm in which it originated."

-- Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences

Taipei, Taiwan

"Marriage always holds your partner's happiness hostage, and the price of ransom is always your development."

-- David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships

"The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us."

-- Max Weber, ""Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy", The Methodology of the Social Sciences

"Finally, my friends, mes cheres amis, there's one value we almost never mention on a political podium. But it seems to me a key liberal value, and I learned it from my mother. When my mother passed the pie over the table, she would say, "have a liberal helping". "Liberal" means generous. When my Russian ancestors arrived in Montreal in 1928, they didn't have much of anything apart from what most immigrants have — courage to try a new life, and the hope that their new country would take them in. My Russian family found a home, a pays des iles, a foyer nouveau, un espoir nouveau au Quebec... They were quickly welcomed by the people of Quebec, they spent the rest of their lives in Quebec. They're all there — my Russian grandparents, now my father, my mother, my uncles and aunts, all together in a cemetery on a hillside overlooking the St Francis river. So, if you ask me what Canada means to me, I think of that little graveyard, and I think of the generosity of strangers who became friends.

"Generosity is more than a welcome to strangers. It is an attitude towards ourselves. It means trusting each other, helping without counting the cost, taking risks together. Generosity means leaving our hearts open to others, it means dreaming together that we could be better than we are. That's how this country has always been, and it's the job of this party to keep it like that forever."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Liberal Values in the 21st Century — A Speech to the Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada", March 3, 2005

"Rights is a child of law; from real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from 'law of nature', come imaginary rights... Natural rights is simple non-sense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical non-sense, nonsense upon stilts."

-- Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies

"In a culture where rice is so important, such a staple, the rice cooker can bring a kind of liberation for women."

-- Shabnam Rezaei, in "The Steamy Way to Dinner", The New York Times

"The most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on waves."

-- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

"We have all learned to become sensitive to the physical environment. We know that we depend upon it, that it is fragile, and that we have the power to ruin it, thereby ruining our own lives, or more probably those of our descendants. Perhaps fewer of us are sensitive to what we might call the moral or ethical environment. This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live. It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible. It determines our conceptions of when things are going well and when they are going badly. It determines our conception of what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others. It shapes our emotional responses, determining what is a cause of pride or shame, or anger or gratitude, or what can be forgiven and what cannot. It gives us our standards — our standards of behaviour. In the eyes of some thinkers, most famously perhaps Hegel, it shapes our very identities. Our consciousness of ourselves is largely or even essentially a consciousness of how we stand for other people."

-- Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics

"For all the narcissistic pleasure that comes from poring over clues to my inner makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around."

-- Steven Pinker, "My Genome, My Self", The New York Times Magazine

"Much of what now passes for "natural selection" isn't exactly natural. It's social. As such, it deserves no presumptive respect as a validator or promulgator of objective fitness. Nor does the discovery of a genetic basis for this or that trait prove it's more than a social construct. In the era of cultural selection, many genes are a social construct. Which makes them no less real.

"All of which poses a problem for anyone who equates genes with human nature, or who expects evolution to take God's place as judge and perfecter of humankind. It may be true that today's God is a human creation. But so, in a way, is today's evolution."

-- William Saletan, "Cultural Selection: The Evolution of Evolution", Slate

"In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel."

-- Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

Taipei, Taiwan

"It is possible to observe during [psycho-analytic] treatment that every improvement in [the patient's] condition reduces the rate at which he recovers and diminishes the instinctual force impelling him towards recovery. But this instinctual force is indispensable; reduction of it endangers our aim — the patient's restoration to health. What, then, is the conclusion that forces itself inevitably upon us? Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones."

-- Sigmund Freud, "Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy", The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17

"The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious, and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man."

-- Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning

"[T]he true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope."

-- Barack Obama, Acceptance Speech in Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 4, 2008

"[I]t is not possible to define 'event', 'thing', 'object', 'relationship', and so on, from nature, but that to define them always involves a circuitous return to the grammatical categories of the definer's language."

-- Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality

"To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king... One reason they're good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it's over for them."

-- Tim Wu, in "Google's Gatekeepers", The New York Times Magazine

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves."

-- Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

"It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument — attack, defense, counterattack, etc. — reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing."

-- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

"He’s looking a lot more presidential now; he walks a little different."

-- Zariff, in "For Obama and Family, a Personal Transition", The New York Times

"A man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

-- Albert Camus, Betwixt and Between

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

"Generosity, unity, sovereignty, justice. The courage to choose, the will to govern. These are the beacons of a liberal politics."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Speech to the Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada", March 3, 2005

"The new "theory of justice" [by philosopher John Rawls] demands that men counteract the "injustice" of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive "those favored by nature" (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life) — and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with."

-- Ayn Rand, "An Untitled Letter", Philosophy: Who Needs It

"For good people are just good, while bad people are bad in all sorts of ways."

-- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

"Behind the two divergent attitudes of the anthropologist who is a critic at home and a conformist abroad, there lies, then, another contradiction from which he finds it even more difficult to escape. If he wishes to contribute to the improvement of his own community, he must condemn social conditions similar to those he is fighting against, wherever they exist, in which case he relinquishes his objectivity and impartiality. Conversely, the detachment to which he is constrained by moral scrupulousness and scientific accuracy prevents him from criticizing his own society, since he is refraining from judging any one society in order to acquire knowledge of them all. Action within one's own society precludes understanding of other societies, but a thirst for universal understanding involves renouncing all possibility of reform."

-- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques