Every scientific “fulfillment” raises new “questions” and cries out to be surpassed and rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.
Max Weber, from a speech (1918) presented at Munich University, published in 1919, and collected in ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf,’ Gessammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (1922), 524–525, as translated by Rodney Livingstone in David Owen (ed.), The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation: Politics as a Vocation (2004), 11.
A trusty companion halves the journey and doubles the courage.
Edward Bulwer Lytton
The entire able-bodied population are preparing to massacre one another; though no one, it is true, wants to attack, and everybody protests his love of peace and determination to maintain it, yet the whole world feels that it only requires some unforeseen incident, some unpreventable accident, for the spark to fall in a flash . . . and blow all Europe sky-high.
Frédéric Passy, February 4, 1895
Man’s concern is not with government; he should look on government as no more than a very secondary thing — we might almost say a very minor thing. His goal is industry, labour and the production of everything needed for his happiness. In a well-ordered state, the government must only be an adjunct of production, an agency charged by the producers, who pay for it, with protecting their persons and their goods while they work. In a well-ordered state, the largest number of persons must work, and the smallest number must govern. The work of perfection would be reached if all the world worked and no one governed.
“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”
You have to use deception to a degree. Either you deceive your source or you deceive your audience. The problem with journalism and the reason why it’s in decline is because these ‘leakers,’ these ‘sources’ in government and elsewhere intentionally transmit stuff to the media [who] parrot it to the masses.
James O’Keefe on the nature of modern major network and cable news, and Brian Stelter’s recent confession that CNN doesn’t do investigation, in conversation with Dave Rubin, The Rubin Report, May 3, 2019.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.
Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830).
Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (1913, 1967), p. 429.
We must be severe, not only with ourselves, but with other also; exigent, not only with ourselves, but with others also; and so, on the contrary, benevolent not only towards others, but also toward ourselves; compassionate, not only toward others, but also towards this instrument of labour that we carry about with us and of which we sometimes demand too much; that is, our empirical individuality. Reality is neither democratic nor aristocratic, but both together; it abhors the privilege of some over others as much as that equality, according to which each one must have the same value as the other at every moment.
In the not-so-distant future, the bulk of our culture will be composed of designer viruses. Why? Because now that we know how to design them, we will. We will conquer the conceptual landscape as surely as we conquered the wilderness.
Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), p. 196.