Sublime
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You do not realize that in public life a man must use his reason rather than give way to his emotions. If we try to dissuade the rebels now they will kill us before they kill the English, and then they will kill the King.”
William Dalrymple • The Last Mughal
You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago: And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to em
... See moreJonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Many times an old man has no other evidence besides his age to prove he has lived a long time.” —SENECA, ON TRANQUILITY OF MIND, 3.8b
Ryan Holiday • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius
To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
John Jay • The Federalist Papers (AmazonClassics Edition)
Hume’s real argument is that, while we sometimes perceive relations of time and place, we never perceive causal relations, which must therefore, if admitted, be inferred from relations that can be perceived. The controversy is thus reduced to one of empirical fact: Do we, or do we not, sometimes perceive a relation which can be called causal? Hume
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
It does not follow that there is no simple Self; it only follows that we cannot know whether there is or not, and that the Self, except as a bundle of perceptions, cannot enter into any part of our knowledge. This conclusion is important in metaphysics, as getting rid of the last surviving use of “substance.” It is important in theology, as abolish
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
but I am still of opinion that where there are 100,000,000 of men, and forty distinct nations, unequally strong, the continuance of the Federal Government can only be a fortunate accident.
Alexis de Tocqueville • Democracy in America, Volume I and II (Optimized for Kindle)
Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies: on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness. But when David Hume was alive, he was fighting a three-way battle. Enl
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