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).
November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of English-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-English novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.
The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.
Recommended reading from these authors include:
Silas Marner (1861), a short and brilliant novel by George Eliot. Her most generally esteemed classic is the much longer Middlemarch (1872).
Earthly Powers (1980), a massive novel about life in the 20th century, by the ever-iconoclastic and hard-to-pin-down Anthony Burgess. His most famous novel is undoubtedly A Clockwork Orange (1963).
“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the former being C.S. Lewis’s thoughtful essay on the nature of modern tyranny, and the latter being what some regard his best novel, a retelling of the Psyche myth.
Brave New World (1931) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the former is Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire on technological tyranny, and the latter is the author’s survey of the issues raised by — and the degrees to which reality conforms to — his earlier fictional prophecy. The two books are often to be found printed under one cover.
On November 21, 1620, Plymouth Colony settlers signed the Mayflower Compact.
On this day in 1922, Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia took the oath of office, becoming the first female United States Senator.
November 21st birthdays include:
1694 – Voltaire, French philosopher (d. 1778) — portrait above
1729 – Josiah Bartlett, American signer of the Declaration of Independence (d. 1795)
1870 – Alexander Berkman, anarchist (d. 1936), who shot but did not kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick
Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.
Josiah Bartlett, chief executive, president, and governor of the State of New Hampshire, and before that delegate to the Continental Congress — not to be confused with the fictional U. S. President played by Martin Sheen on The West Wing.