All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life – the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.”

“Mortals are odd creatures in that sense—flawed yet hopeful. One can study them through millennia and still get nowhere near full understanding of their nature.”

“This causation exists as a streamed organization of constantly fluid potential. Anything that can be must first hold the streaming potential to be. It is soul. It is always potential. It is never static. It is never rigid. Its essence is all these, which means it can not be anything other and be the Primal Cause. It is never nothing. Nothing does not exist with it. It is something. It is anything. It is everything. At the same time! Just like your consciousness. Pure Unordered Potential!”

“Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another–not even for his wife–would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls–young existentialist girls–you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.”

“There is ascension to potential that Plato couldn’t conceive while prescribing idealism to conception as highest existences. With Streams, there isn’t a difference between ideas and instantiations. They are both authenticated within all possibilities in Stream, within the Primal Cause as ordered. Ideas as ordered constructs in consciousness, instantiations as ordered effects. Instantiations for instance are ordered products from ideas. Ideas are ordered constructs in consciousness. And in authentication, they are the same as external effects.”

“It is impossible for Stream to achieve unhappiness. Indeed it is. Unless that is, it exists in consciousness. It is impossible for the unordered to achieve happiness or unhappiness unless it were to Flow a certain way in relation with ordered effects.Unhappiness, happiness is a potential activated by the ordered in Flow.”

“Rudeness instantly establishes a set of norms, a set of regulatory orders, authority, and power. To be rude is to go against an established accepted concept or ordered regulation. Thus rudeness could be in kind, a deviation from the norm. Rudeness can also be in kind an instantiation outside a set foundation. A deviation from a norm holds the same set foundation as the norm, their disagreement merely a manner of degrees.”

“One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.”

“A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world. The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done, thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one’s own, whether it be “conservative,” ” non-violent,” or “spiritual,” is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of that Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place.”

“While it was well within their powers to toy around with mortals like hapless puppets, deeper human workings remained elusive to them. The heart, the soul, the very foundation of man’s nature—those were mysteries to the gods, for all their manipulations.”

“For an act to be evil, you must first perceive it, process and then conceive it as such. Then these acts are effects. They’re not causes. And by this I mean that these acts are not of Stream. Now we ask the other question again. What does it take for something, here specifically Stream, to be good or evil?”

“We make versions, and true versions make worlds.”

“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.”

“A truth is not necessary, because we negatively are not able to conceive the actual existence of the opposite thereof;but a truth is necessary when we positively are able to apprehend that the negation thereof includes an inevitable contradiction. It is not that that we can see how the opposite comes to be true, but it is that the opposite can not possibly be true.”

“Manlius … took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.”