iterables

2009-12-01T11:27:00.001-07:00

"One well-established way of confirming and consolidating a leave-taking is for the leave-taker to move away physically from the other or others... this can cause a problem when two persons pause for a moment's sociability and then find that their directions of movement do not diverge sharply. If the two persons walk at a normal pace, they find themselves attempting to close out the encounter while still having easy physical access to each other. Sometimes one individual offers an excuse to break into a run; sometimes, even if it takes him out of his way, he may take a path diverging sharply from that taken by his erstwhile coparticipant."

-- Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings

2009-09-22T14:36:00.000-06:00

"To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated."

-- Michael Oakeshott, "On Being Conservative", Rationalism in Politics and other essays

2009-09-02T21:59:00.000-06:00

"I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life."

-- Salahidin Abdulahat, in "Out of Guantánamo, Uighurs Bask in Bermuda", The New York Times

2009-08-15T20:55:00.000-06:00

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

-- Plato, The Republic

2009-07-30T21:39:00.000-06:00

"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.)

2009-07-19T01:34:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-07-10T07:17:00.000-06:00

Nha Trang, Vietnam,

2009-07-02T04:37:00.001-06:00

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

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

2009-06-26T11:32:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-06-21T08:54:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-06-03T09:53:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-05-17T00:26:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-05-09T00:08:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-05-02T14:27:00.000-06:00

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

-- Albert Einstein

2009-04-27T10:05:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-04-25T00:24:00.000-06:00

Shanghai, China

2009-04-20T22:03:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-04-17T11:04:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-04-06T16:54:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-04-04T12:50:00.000-06:00

"[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

2009-04-02T19:39:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-03-27T10:46:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-03-18T22:37:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-03-14T02:41:00.001-06:00

"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

2009-03-11T01:25:00.002-06:00

"[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

2009-03-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-03-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Taipei, Taiwan

2009-02-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-02-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-02-05T22:50:00.001-07:00

"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

2009-02-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-01-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-01-26T10:15:00.001-07:00

"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

2009-01-18T12:43:00.001-07:00

"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

2009-01-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-01-01T12:31:00.003-07:00

"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

2008-12-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

Taipei, Taiwan

2008-12-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-12-20T18:13:00.001-07:00

"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

2008-12-03T19:48:00.001-07:00

"[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

2008-12-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

"[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

2008-11-30T21:41:00.002-07:00

"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

2008-11-24T10:04:00.001-07:00

"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

2008-11-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-11-19T13:58:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-11-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-11-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

2008-11-08T14:44:00.002-07:00

"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

2008-11-04T10:06:00.001-07:00

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

-- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

2008-11-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-11-01T10:37:00.000-06:00

"We’ve picked bad presidents before, and we’ve survived as a nation, but we will not survive if we lose the institution of marriage."

-- Tony Perkins, in "A Line in the Sand for Same-Sex Marriage Foes", The New York Times

2008-10-29T13:40:00.000-06:00

"How will Hong Kong, freshly and profoundly dependent on China, define itself? Will it be eclipsed by Shanghai and Beijing or evolve a distinctive cultural identity?... Official Web sites, as well as banners, buses and billboards across the city, declare Hong Kong "Asia's world city." There may be some truth in this. Shanghai and Beijing are, despite their glossy Western veneers, profoundly Chinese cities, marked by vast hinterlands and dominated by Mandarin speakers. I have never felt anything but a foreigner in them, whereas Hong Kong, whose economic foundations were laid by foreign businessmen and Chinese fleeing war and revolution on the mainland, has always struck me as the New World to China's Old, the place where new, plural identities are possible."

-- Pankaj Mishra, "Hong Kong's Moment", T: The New York Times Style Magazine

2008-10-22T10:05:00.000-06:00

"While Socrates and minds of his stamp may be able to acquire virtue through reason, mankind would long ago have ceased to be if its preservation had depended solely on the reasonings of those who make it up."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men

2008-10-20T17:53:00.000-06:00

"How can we get more organs? By redefining death."

-- William Saletan, "Undead Babies: The Retreating Boundaries of Organ Harvesting", Slate

2008-10-19T16:32:00.000-06:00

"We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don't really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price is too high for us to pay. We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitation to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it."

-- James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good Or Evil

2008-10-15T21:41:00.000-06:00

"I don't consider myself a Chicagoan. I consider myself a Hyde Parker."

-- Richard Epstein, in "Uncommon Ground", The Washington Post

2008-10-12T03:04:00.000-06:00

"Knowing that his audiences are capable of forming bad impressions of him, the individual may come to feel ashamed of a well-intentioned honest act merely because the context of its performance provides false impressions that are bad. Feeling this unwarranted shame, he may feel that his feelings can be seen; feeling that he can be seen, he may feel that his appearance confirms these false conclusions concerning him. He may then add to the precariousness of his position by engaging in just those defensive maneuvers that he would employ were he really guilty. In this way it is possible for all of us to become fleetingly for ourselves the worst person we can imagine that others might imagine us to be."

-- Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

2008-10-05T09:39:00.000-06:00

Angkor, Cambodia

2008-10-03T22:25:00.000-06:00

"There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

2008-09-27T14:29:00.000-06:00

"Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or smooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they support them, or they totally destroy them."

-- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

2008-09-19T20:10:00.000-06:00

"What, then, is truth? A movable army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensual vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

2008-09-13T18:10:00.000-06:00

"At intimate suppers, on hunts, in conversations between two or three men, matters of state of the most vital importance are decided. Meetings of party forums, conferences of the government and assemblies, serve no purpose but to make declarations and put in an appearance."

-- Milovan Djilas, The New Class

2008-09-11T22:13:00.000-06:00

"Whatever interests and concerns us puts itself in the place of what is strange and uninteresting. After-images of earlier thoughts trouble new perceptions."

-- Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis

2008-09-05T20:30:00.000-06:00

"At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right."

-- Confucius, The Analects

2008-09-02T14:27:00.001-06:00

They tell me everything is gonna be alright,
but I don't know what alright even means.

-- Bob Dylan, "Tryin' To Get To Heaven", Time Out of Mind (album)

2008-08-30T10:55:00.000-06:00

"The Qur'an does not mention constitutionalism, but human rational thinking and experience have shown that constitutionalism is necessary for realizing the just and good society prescribed by the Qur'an. An Islamic justification and support for constitutionalism is important and relevant for Muslims. Non-Muslims may have their own secular or other justifications. As long as all are agreed on the principle and specific rules of constitutionalism, including complete equality and non-discrimination on the grounds of gender or religion, each may have his or her own reasons for coming to that agreement."

-- Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law

2008-08-26T12:08:00.000-06:00

"It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else."

-- Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

2008-08-18T11:20:00.002-06:00

"It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be."

-- T.S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature", Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot

2008-08-17T22:57:00.001-06:00

"Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no matter of fact in the case."

-- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

2008-08-16T22:46:00.000-06:00

"Our joy is not for Communists... it’s for what hosting the Olympics means to the history of the Chinese people."

-- Joe Lam, in "For Many Expatriates, Olympics Signal China’s Arrival", The New York Times

2008-08-15T13:24:00.000-06:00

"It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even... Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it."

-- Hélène Samuel, in "In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic", The New York Times

2008-08-07T22:19:00.001-06:00

"To tear down the walls of the state is not... to create a world without walls, but rather to create a thousand petty fortresses. The fortresses, too, can be torn down: all that is necessary is a global state sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the local communities. Then the result would be the world of the political economist — a world of deracinated men and women."

-- Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice

2008-08-03T22:16:00.003-06:00

"Libertarianism is a philosophy of government, but conservatism is a philosophy of life... Conservatives defend freedom not because they believe in the right to do as you please, but because freedom is the precondition for virtue... Without freedom there is no virtue: A coerced virtue is no virtue at all... The best argument for freedom is not that it is an end in itself but that it is the necessary prerequisite for choosing what is right."

-- Dinesh D'Souza, "The Libertarian Temptation", Letters to a Young Conservative

2008-08-01T19:52:00.000-06:00

Tokyo, Japan

2008-07-29T08:54:00.000-06:00

"The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions.

"At the heart of the debate is the question of what the international system is. Is it just a collection of legal nuts and bolts cobbled together by governments to protect governments? Or is it a living framework of rules intended to make the world a more humane place?"

-- Madeleine K. Albright, "The End of Intervention", The New York Times

2008-07-18T14:28:00.001-06:00

"Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited."

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

2008-07-15T14:04:00.000-06:00

"The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be no less at risk than its business and industry if government were everywhere to take the place of associations.

"Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart expands, and the human spirit develops only through the reciprocal action of human beings on one another."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

2008-07-09T12:40:00.000-06:00

"The role of neuromarketing is to understand how people feel and react... It in no way sets out to meddle with normal, natural response mechanisms."

-- Elissa Moses, in "Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All", The New York Times

2008-06-23T17:13:00.000-06:00

"We live in an age of conspicuous compassion. Immodest alms-giving may be as old as humanity — consider the tale of Jesus rebuking the self-exalting Pharisee — but it has flowered spectacularly of recent. We are given to ostentatious displays of empathy to a degree hitherto unknown...

"This book’s thesis is that such displays of empathy do not change the world for the better: they do not help the poor, diseased, dispossessed or bereaved. Our culture of ostentatious caring concerns, rather, projecting one's ego, and informing others what a deeply caring individual you are. It is about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish."

-- Patrick West, Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes it Really is Cruel to be Kind

2008-06-21T14:14:00.000-06:00

"The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

2008-06-18T17:10:00.000-06:00

"Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular... Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in — whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no — is what we mean by having a religion."

-- George Santayana, Reason in Religion

2008-06-01T16:26:00.001-06:00

"It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world."

-- Brian Greene, "Put a Little Science in Your Life", The New York Times

2008-05-29T22:13:00.002-06:00

"Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight, not to speak of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism."

-- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement

2008-05-25T21:43:00.000-06:00

Luang Prabang, Laos

2008-05-22T12:33:00.000-06:00

"As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name... He’s penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man — he’s like a reflection of us in the mirror."

-- Serge Hefez, in "A Passion for (and Against) Sarkozy", The New York Times

2008-05-21T09:10:00.000-06:00

"It so happens that liberty itself is the product of regulation. Far from being a type of antagonist to social action, it is the resultant. It is so little a property inherent in the state of nature that it is, on the contrary, a conquest by society over nature... In the final analysis what constitutes liberty is the subordination of external to social forces, for it is only on this condition that the latter can develop freely. Yet such a subordination is rather an utter reversal of the natural order. Thus it can only be realized progressively, as man raises himself above things so as to regulate them as he wishes, stripping them of their fortuitous, absurd, and amoral character, that is, to the extent that he becomes a social being... The task for the most advanced societies may therefore be said to be a mission for justice... Just as ancient peoples had above all need of a common faith to live by, we have need of justice."

-- Emile Durkhiem, The Division of Labour in Society

2008-05-19T13:15:00.000-06:00

"[Yet] another meaningless statistic by the world's self appointed elite to justify further government studies for further government programs for further government intrusion into your life."

-- from "Readers' Comments: Canada ranked at No. 11 in Global Peace Index", CTV News

2008-05-16T17:51:00.001-06:00

"The aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art. In other words, it presupposes the distance from the world which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world... Contrary to what certain mechanistic theories would suggest, even in its most specifically artistic dimension the pedagogic action of the family and the school operates at least as much through the economic and social conditions which are the precondition of its operation as through the contents which it inculcates."

-- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

2008-05-14T14:55:00.000-06:00

"There can be no individual freedom... when the group with which the individual identifies himself is not free."

-- American Anthropological Association, Statement on Human Rights (1947)

2008-05-12T04:49:00.000-06:00

"A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation — this self — is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited."

-- Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

2008-05-09T20:45:00.000-06:00

"All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form!"

-- William James, Principles of Psychology

2008-05-08T22:32:00.000-06:00

"The practical consequences of any political tenet go a great deal way in deciding upon its value. Political problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to good or evil. What in the result is likely to produce evil, is politically false: that which is productive of good, politically is true."

-- Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

2008-05-07T10:08:00.000-06:00

Hong Kong

2008-05-04T22:29:00.000-06:00

"Like a myth, a mask denies as much as it affirms. It is not made solely of what it says or thinks it is saying, but of what it excludes."

-- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of Masks

2008-05-03T04:10:00.001-06:00

"All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself. It will discontinue assessing the value of the individual facts in terms of their relationships to ultimate value-ideas. Indeed, it will lose its awareness of its ultimate rootedness in the value-ideas in general. And it is well that should be so. But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought. It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labours."

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

2008-04-29T02:26:00.000-06:00

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

2008-04-27T12:45:00.001-06:00

"The climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us... and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

"For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place."

-- Michael Pollan, "Why Bother?", The New York Times Magazine

2008-04-26T21:41:00.001-06:00

"All periods of social decline and disintegration are characterized by overestimation of the sexual in life and in ideology, and what is more, of the sexual in an extreme unidimensional conception; its asocial aspect, taken in isolation, is advanced to the forefront. The sexual aims at becoming a surrogate for the social... Only those social relations that can be sexualized are meaningful and valuable. Everything else becomes null and void."

-- V.N. Volosinov, "The Content of Consciousness as Ideology", Freudianism: A Marxist Critique

2008-04-25T22:50:00.000-06:00

Nha Trang, Vietnam

2008-04-23T03:54:00.002-06:00

"While each one of [The Moderns] defines this [Natural] Law in his own fashion, all of them base it on such metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people capable of understanding these principles, let alone of discovering them on their own. So that all the definitions by these learned men, which in every other respect are in constant contradiction with one another, agree only in this, that it is impossible to understand the Law of Nature and to obey it without being a very great reasoner and a profound Metaphysician. Which precisely means that in order to establish society men must have employed an enlightenment which develops only with much difficulty and among very few people within society itself."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men