Category: Thought

“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”

“When someone has behaved like an animal, he says: ‘I’m only human!’ But when he is treated like an animal, he says: ‘I’m human, too!’”

Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations.

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge.

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher and outspoken anti-fascist. He called his political philosophy “liberism.”

Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written.

Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (1623), as translated in The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966), by Richard Henry Popkin, p. 65.

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.

Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human. . . . No people will be truly free till all are free.

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher and outspoken anti-fascist. He called his political philosophy “liberism.”

[W]e did not invent the biotruths of human nature, no more than we invented vision, speech, the circulation of blood, the beating of the heart.

We did not invent men and women.

They are what they are, and what they are not is hollow vessels to be filled with whatever sugars and syrups their betters, the anointed cooks of humanity, the intolerant coveters of power and would-be imposers of values, see fit to pour into receptive, neutral containers to be labeled from the outside by strangers who do not know them, or themselves, and to be filled with whatever contents these outsiders might deem in their own best interests!

John Norman, GorChronicles.com

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana, “Why I Am Not a Marxist” Modern Monthly: Volume: 9 (April 1935); Page: 77-79.

Man was created for social intercourse; but social intercourse cannot be maintained without a sense of justice; then man must have been created with a sense of justice.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816.