Sublime

“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”

people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.

not because he is inferior to the authorities which conduct it, or that he is less capable than his neighbor of governing himself, but because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow-men, and because he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force.

Rousseau atribuía a uma política ruim a capacidade de tornar o homem mau, e a uma política boa a capacidade de fazê-lo bom.

is Husak

My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.

Meanwhile science as technique was building up in practical men a quite different outlook from any that was to be found among theoretical philosophers. Technique conferred a sense of power: man is now much less at the mercy of his environment than he was in former times. But the power conferred by technique is social, not individual; an average ind