Last week, Paul attended an international conference on direct democracy. Listen and compare rationales:
If you speak Spanish, or are a monolingual English-speaking absurdist, you might enjoy this translated version.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).
November 26, 1792, saw the birth of Sarah Moore Grimké, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the elder sister of the equally famed Angelina Emily Grimké Weld.
November 25, 1975, Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands.
On the same month and date 17 years later, the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia voted to split the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia (officially disjoined as of January 1, 1993).
Without intelligence there is not rational life: and things are only good, in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life, which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man’s perfecting of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677), Part IV, Appendix V.
November 24th marks the birthdays of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632) and three influential Americans: ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1868), self-help writer Dale Carnegie (1888), and conservative editor, writer, and television personality William F. Buckley Jr. (1925).
Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).
On November 23, 1644, British poet John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.
All philosophies have the common property of being speculative, and, therefore, their immediate influence on those who hold them is in many ways alike, however opposed the theories may be to one another: they all make people theoretical. In this sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality, it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation, accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and makes the sorry escapades of human nature from convention seem even more ignominious than its ruling prejudices.
George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (1916), Chapter XVI, “Egotism in Practice.”
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).