Fitzgerald: "I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands
the whole heritage of youth.
The
... [Show More] surrealists have a perspective closest to that of
Freud
Communism can be defined as
state ownership of the means of production
Mussolini's establishment of a National Council of Experts, a minimum wage, a retirement system, and high, progressive tax rates helped to inspire
Roosevelt's New Deal
The prosperity of the 1920s brought with it
a flowering of literature and the arts
The problem of normativity concerns the gap between
is and ought
In the 19th Century, both Democrats and Republicans adhered to
bottom-up political ideologies
The Cheka:
Lenin's secret police
"...here, there and a little everywhere":
dada
NOT a consequence of the Agricultural Revolution:
increased need for labor on farms
Pirandello sees as reality as
irrational, even contradictory
The decentralized, market-driven evolution of social forces resulting from people's free choices is
free enterprise
Described as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen":
Sherlock Holmes
Dostoevsky: the vision of the anointed inevitably leads to
narcissism
The Grand Inquisitor is willing to take away ____ to give people ____.
freedom; happiness
What takes us from is to ought, according to Hume, is
feeling
The goal of the Red Terror:
extermination of the bourgeoisie
Protagoras, in saying "Man is the measure of all things," advocates
relativism
Nietzsche: our theories of the world change
in irrational, unpredictable ways
Ortega y Gasset rejects realism on the grounds that it
leads inevitably to skepticism
Julien Benda: This "formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world":
hypocrisy
Absolute truth, for Ortega y Gasset, is
the limit of individual perspectives
Which is an instrumental good?
hammer
Julien Benda sees this group as opposed to civilization, training a group of leaders who no longer believe in their own society or its values:
intellectuals
Lenin responded to a crisis in Soviet agriculture in 1921 by
allowing peasant farmers to own land and seek their crops
The Holodomor:
Stalin's man-made Ukrainian famine
Between 1929 and 1933, the US money supply
fell by more than a third
NOT a result of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930:
??
"I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world, 'Do your worst.'" The author led which political party, in which country?
The Labour Party, United Kingdom
The event that flipped the balance of power in Europe in Germany's favor:
the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland
The Enabling Act, passed in 1933,
gave all legislative power to Hitler and his cabinet
The Night of the Long Knives: the victims were
political opponents of Adolf Hitler
June 6, 1944:
D-Day, the invasion of Normandy
Oikophobia is fear or hatred of
one's own
Bad faith is the opposite of
authenticity
Camus's response to the existential dilemma:
"my revolt, my freedom, my passion"
Camus sees it as inevitable that, in our everyday experience, we at some point encounter
the absurd
"I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace," Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of
Stalin
The tragedy of the commons arises because
what makes sense for each might not make sense for all
Pluralism: the view that
goods differ in kind
The view that normative statements are not truth-apt:
noncognitivism
Noncognitivism in ethics holds that saying 'Murder is wrong' amounts to saying
"Murder: Boo!"
Part of Roosevelt's Second New Deal:
the Social Security system
Rawls's veil of ignorance: those choosing principles of justice in an ideal circumstance should NOT know
their natural abilities, propensities, or conception of the good
The doctrine that the United States would have to apply occasional counterforce to attempts at Communist expansion:
containment
Lyotard's definition of postmodernism:
incredulity toward metanarratives
"the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations":
structuralism
Reagan: "the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth":
a government bureau
A philosopher holding an end-result theory of justice:
rawls
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us.""
Dostoevsky
"Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?"
Marx
"Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men."
Borges
'But at this rate almost everything one says... turns out to be a sort of lie.'
Murdoch
"The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life."
Marx
"There were thousands of [officers], all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best---in a way that cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly."
Remarque
"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence...."
Marx
"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
Shaw
"Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering."
Dostoevsky
"Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin."
Dostoevsky
"Dream-distortion, then, proves in reality to be an act of censorship."
Freud
"Precisely it is not to think of your soul, but to think of other people."
Murdoch
"He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times.This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time."
Borges
"But everything so far that has made metaphysical assumptions valuable, frightful, delightful, is passion, error, and self-deception—the worst methods of attaining knowledge, not the very best, have taught us to believe in them."
Nietzsche
"That the vicissitudes of economic life -- discoveries of raw materials, new technical processes, and scientific inventions -- have their importance, no one denies; but that they suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of other factors is absurd."
Mussolini
"The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself."
Murdoch
"Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual."
Mussolini
"Actions don't lie, words always do."
Murdoch
"Everything that we need and which can be given to us only now that the individual sciences have reached their present height, is a chemistry of the moral, religious, and aesthetic conceptions and sensations."
Nietzsche
"If the XIXth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State."
Mussolini
"Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it - i.e., of classifying it - implies a falsification."
Borges
"No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition."
Camus
"And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power."
Hayek
"It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end."
Camus
"I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it."
Camus
"Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die."
Borges
"...the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."
Camus
This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.
Borges
"Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels."
Borges
"Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me...."
Borges
"For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity."
Lewis
"I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion."
Camus
"...each person participating in a practice, or affected by it, has an equal right to most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all...."
Rawls
"...they had somewhere abdicated their responsibilities, somehow breached their primary loyalties...."
Didion
"...inequalities are arbitrary unless it is unreasonable to expect that they will work out for everyone's advantage, and provided the positions and offices to which they attach, or from which they may be gained, are open to all."
Rawls
"Not: I can prove something because reality is the way I say it is. But: as long as I can produce proof, it is permissible to think that reality is the way I say it is."
Lyotard
"...it is difficult to believe that "the good" is a knowable quantity."
Didion
"What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift."
Nozick
"("Tell me," a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. "Do you think God cares?""
Didion
"...it is also necessary that the various offices to which special benefits or burdens attach are open to all."
Rawls
:...all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue."
Didion
"Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at 'nodal points' of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be."
Lyotard
"The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie."
Havel
"One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint."
Solzhenitsyn
"given the complex system of manipulation on which the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it is also dependent, every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system...."
Havel
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas."
Solzhenitsyn
Shaw sees civilization as
corrupt and built of rotten materials
Results of Lenin's revolution:
famine and the collapse of industry
Lenin's plan for dealing with those who oppose the revolution:
execution (standing them against a wall)
Around 1900, Democrats became convinced that economic power was centralizing, due to
the rise of the corporation
Among the Allied Powers in World War I:
France
The third section of The Waste Land, The Fire Sermon, models its theme on, and takes its name from,
a sermon of the Buddha
Arguably the first postmodern novel:
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Yeats sees history as a series of
2000-year cycles
The agency of the mind that constructs wishes Freud later refers to as the
id
The basic objects of the manifest image are
people, plants, animals, and ordinary material objects
An element of Mussolini's program:
an 8-hour workday and minimum wage
The immediate cause of World War I:
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
The paradox of the anointed: the vision of the anointed cuts the anointed off from
norms that might guide their decisions
The signal achievement of the scientific revolution:
a system of universal and necessary laws of nature
The golden rule:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The centralized, conscious direction of social forces to consciously chosen ends is
socialism
The story of the blind men and the elephant illustrates
perspectivism
Keynesian and neoclassical economists tend to agree that, in the face of an economic slowdown, government should
cut taxes
Lenin's revolution led, by 1921, to
famine and the collapse of industry
The Gulag Archepelago:
a system of prison camps in the Soviet Union
Roosevelt's First New Deal included the National Industrial Recovery Act, a National Planning Board, and the National Recovery Administration. NOT an effect of those:
a decline in unemployment to under 15%Problem: class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Mussolini's solution:
Problem: class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Mussolini's solution:
get both to work for a common goal: the State
Gleichschaltung
thought control, molding society to a single worldview
In Germany, the price of a loaf of bread, which had been .13 in 1914, by November 15, 1923 had become
100,000,000,000 marks
The missing explanation argument: ________ cannot explain ___________.
idealism; regularities in experience
The Nazi Party built its electoral appeal in part by
inciting street violence and blaming it on the opposition
The idealist's central argument against realism: that realism inevitably leads to
skepticism
Heidegger believes we confront an existential problem, because we find ourselves
thrown into a world not of our own making
The slogan "existence precedes essence" defines
Existentialism
Camus's goal: to live
without appeal
The line dividing the free countries of Western Europe from those under Soviet domination after World War II:
the Iron Curtain
Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
The problem of distributed knowledge:
markets contain vast amounts of information that no one person or group can possess
In Plato's image of the soul as a chariot, the driver is
the rational element
Augustine speaks of the goal of moral education as ordo amoris, the order of loves (or affections), meaning that we must learn to
make our feelings congruent with the circumstances giving rise to them
Federal government spending, as a proportion of the economy, has risen from a historical base of around 3% from 1790 to 1914 to around _____ today.
24%
Rawls's first principle:
Each should have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with similar liberties for others
"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benedictions and her prayers.... She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." This expresses the foreign policy doctrine of
John Quincy Adams
Descartes: I am, essentially,
a thing that thinks
Descartes: things I cannot doubt—
I am, I think
Margaret Thatcher: "the problem with socialism is that eventually
you run out of other people's money
"For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance."
Dostoevsky
"a reason should be given for how this new relation ['ought'] can be—inconceivably! —a deduction from others that are entirely different from it."
Hume
"An action or sentiment, or character is virtuous or vicious; why? Because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind."
Hume
'The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.'
Murdoch
"Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else."
Mussolini
"We have found that the dream represents a wish as fulfilled."
Freud
"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."
Shaw
"...the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another."
Marx
"All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing."
Murdoch
"In every system of morality I have met with I have noticed that the author ... suddenly surprises me by moving from propositions with the usual copula 'is' (or 'is not') to ones that are connected by 'ought' (or 'ought not')."
Hume
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
Marx
"Everyone has something to hide."
Christie
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations."
Marx
"Granted that his generation, however bruised and decimated from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress."
Fitzgerald
"The more the state 'plans,' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
Hayek
"Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield."
Borges
"...human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it."
Lewis
"Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me."
Camus
In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he chooses-- simultaneously--all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.
Borges
"...the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time."
Borges
"Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt."
Lewis
"...we heard such stories as cautionary tales, and they still suggest the only kind of "morality" that seems to me to have any but the most potentially mendacious meaning."
Didion
"The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults."
Nozick
"The restrictions which would so arise might be thought of as those a person would keep in mind if he were designing a practice in which his enemy were to assign him his place...."
Rawls
"For better or worse, we are what we learned as children...."
Didion
"...an inequality is allowed only if there is reason to believe that the practice with the inequality, or resulting in it, will work for the advantage of every party engaging in it."
Rawls
"But any offices having special benefits must be won in a fair competition in which contestants are judged on their merits."
Rawls
"Thus the narratives allow the society in which they are told, on the one hand, to define its criteria of competence and, on the other, to evaluate according to those criteria what is performed or can be performed within it."
Lyotard
"Knowledge, then, is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth...."
Lyotard
"Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety."
Havel
"Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"
Solzhenitsyn
"Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism."
Solzhenitsyn
"Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology."
Havel
Yeats sees civilization as
weary and beginning to collapse
Kipling sees civilization as
fragile and in need of defense
An absolute quantity in Einstein's special theory of relativity:
the speed of light
Sorel's revolutionary syndicalism differed from orthodox Marxism in its stress on
the power of social myths
George Bernard Shaw's golden rule:
There are no golden rules
The paradox of progressivism: Centralizing political power in the federal government
threatens liberty even more than centralized economic power
One might criticize Freud's theory, as Karl Popper did, on the ground that
it predicts nothing and so has no scientific content
Morals have an influence on actions and affections, but reason alone doesn't. So, Hume concludes,
morality is not a conclusion of reason
Realism is the view that
some truths are mind-independent
Elected with more than 60% of the popular vote, in the first Presidential election in which women had the right to vote:
Warren G. Harding
A bottom-up political theory holds that __________ get(s) its rights, freedoms, powers, and privileges from __________.
government; the people
The New Class (nomenklatura):
the privileged ruling class in a socialist state
Ivan Karamazov thinks that people, most fundamentally, want
to be taken care of
Progressives held that the only way to keep economic power from centralizing in the hands of an elite few was to
centralize political power and use it against corporations
Harding responded to the recession after the end of World War I by
cutting federal spending 40%
The two bloodiest battles of World War I:
Somme and Verdun
Einstein's theory of relativity does NOT support relativism, because
the laws of physics are invariant across inertial frames
The most valuable intrinsic goods, according to G. E. Moore:
??
Ortega y Gasset rejects idealism, for, he contends, it cannot explain
hard realities not of our own making
A key component of the First New Deal, struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in US v. Butler (1936):
the Agricultural Adjustment Act
How much time elapsed between the German invasion of France in 1940 and France's surrender?
6 weeks
In December 1941, events on two successive days turned the tide against Germany's war effort:
the Russians counterattacked, and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
Charles Taylor describes us as "self-interpreting animals," a point Sartre makes by saying we have
being for itself
"A long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies" together with "the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points":
containment
Whitaker Chambers: "She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words:
one night he heard screams."
`Kindness is a virtue' is equivalent to 'Kindness merits approval,' according to
natural law theory
The view that 'murder is wrong' is equivalent to 'I (or we) disapprove of murder' is
subjectivism
The view that government authority is justified if people would, under ideal circumstances, agree to live under it:
social contract theory
In response to discovering missile bases under construction in Cuba, President Kennedy decided to
impose a naval blockade
Postmodernists generally hold that reason
a tool by which some groups oppress others
The U. S. economy in the late 1970s was characterized by
"stagflation": stagnation plus inflation
"Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world."
Borges
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Shaw
"If you injure your neighbor, better not do it by halves."
Shaw
"A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world."
Borges
"This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking... is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state."
Borges
"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths."
Marx
"Ought brings you back to is in the end."
Murdoch
'The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.'
Murdoch
"Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient."
Dostoevsky
"The metaphysicians ... do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature."
Borges
"They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."
Remarque
"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."
Borges
"While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger."
Remarque
"Truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence."
Murdoch
"If the circumstances are such as to warrant it, force may be used. And if this be so, it should be used under the conditions which are most favourable. There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win."
Churchill
"In every system of morality I have met with I have noticed that the author ... suddenly surprises me by moving from propositions with the usual copula 'is' (or 'is not') to ones that are connected by 'ought' (or 'ought not')."
Hume
"Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State."
Mussolini
Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Mussolini
"And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible."
Lewis
The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time.
Borges
"This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."
Camus
"They know the Law of Nature; they break it."
Lewis
"The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such combination."
Borges
"It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we never quite grasp."
Borges
"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which reason depends."
Hayek
"The head rules the belly through the chest."
Lewis
"And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power."
Hayek
"How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?"
Borges
"A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before."
Lyotard
""I followed my own conscience." "I did what I thought was right." How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers?"
Didion
"Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at 'nodal points' of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be."
Lyotard
"What I say is true because I prove that it is—but what proof is there that my proof is true?"
Lyotard
"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."
Didion
"In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character...."
Didion
"Except on the most primitive level - our loyalties to those we love - what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience?"
Didion
"... the original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service."
Havel
"Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
Havel
"Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism."
Solzhenitsyn
"In the post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth."
Havel
Dostoevsky's dichotomy: you put at the center of your own universe either
yourself or something higher than you
For Sherlock Holmes, reason ought to be
the master of the passions
Freud responds to challenge posed by unpleasant dreams, such as nightmares, by distinguishing
manifest from latent content
A sense organ perceiving data arising elsewhere and admitted as a separate psychic act, according to Freud:
consciousness
Robert Putnam's definition of social capital:
"features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit"
Marx: The ultimate cause of workers' alienation:
the division of labor
Lynchings and race riots, often deadly, occurred frequently during
1918 and 1919
Calvin Coolidge believed that the proper role of government was to
provide a framework within which people can seize opportunities
A system of social and economic organization that places key institutions under centralized, authoritarian government control through indirect means—regulation, selection of directors, government/management/labor boards, etc.—as well as through direct ownership:
fascism
In the face of the stock market crash, Herbert Hoover
raised taxes and allowed wages to fall??
Stalin's collectivization of agriculture slaughtered ten million people; ten million were forced to Siberia, and another ten million were sent to concentration camps. The rest:
lost all property, becoming, in effect, slaves
Neville Chamberlain said, "...today I share their disappointment, their indignation, that those hopes have been so wantonly shattered. How can these events this week be reconciled with those assurances which I have read out to you?" after the German invasion of
Czechoslovakia
The goal of the State, according to Hitler:
conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind
The first act of the Weimar Republic was to
sign the Treaty of Versailles
Socialism, Hayek argues, tends to treat people as
a means to an end
The terms 'common good' and 'general welfare' have no definite meaning, Hayek argues, because
there is no complete scale of values
In ethics, C. S. Lewis is best described as
natural law theorist
Part of President Johnson's Great Society program:
Medicare
Lyotard distinguishes knowledge from learning, for it includes more, for example,
competences, knowing how to....
NOT one of Nozick's principles of justice:
difference
A theory of distributive justice focusing solely on levels of inequality would be
an end-result theory
"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul...."
Kipling"What do you believe?—This: that the weights of all things must be determined afresh."
"What do you believe?—This: that the weights of all things must be determined afresh."
Nietzsche
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work."
Marx
"Things became duplicated...; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater."
Borges
"Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat."
Marx
"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity."
Shaw
"Everything, however, became what it is. There are no eternal facts. There are no absolute truths."
Nietzsche
"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."
Shaw
"There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound. A gentle refutation of Berkeley."
Murdoch
"The human intellect projected its errors as appearances and its basic assumptions into things."
Nietzsche
"If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too...."
Kipling
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
Shaw
"...if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable."
Camus
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
Borges
"For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe."
Borges
"The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics - all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts."
Borges
"'Common good,' 'general welfare' "have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action."
Hayek
"...the fundamental idea in the concept of justice is fairness...."
Rawls
"...self-deception remains the most difficult deception."
Didion
"However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves."
Didion
"But what is meant by the term knowledge is not only a set of denotative statements, far from it. It also includes notions of 'know-how,' 'knowing how to live,' 'how to listen,' etc."
Lyotard
"...the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious...."
Didion
"Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect."
Didion
"...it is difficult to believe that "the good" is a knowable quantity."
Didion
"Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day."
Solzhenitsyn
"The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations."
Solzhenitsyn [Show Less]