“Opinions lie in the street,” Thomas Mann says somewhere. “Anybody can pick them up” . . . .

4 months ago / 16 visits

“No wild beast is more savage than man when his passion is supplemented with power” ~ Plutarch

5 months ago / 16 visits

“What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” goes a Chinese proverb

5 months ago / 30 visits

The Act of Prohibition makes the withheld items more alluring that it could ever otherwise have been. Excerpt: “Pandora’s Jar” - Natalie Haynes

7 months ago / 34 visits

“A Nation's essence and character lie in its language, its thought and sensibility, its whole style and civilization ~ Kurt Wachsmuth, German philologist

7 months ago / 26 visits

“A Chair is not an artifact of service but an artifact of culture” ~ Ralph Caplan

7 months ago / 41 visits

. . . . .When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.” - page 8

7 months ago / 24 visits

. . . Respect is the homage one pays to the order itself, rather than to the individuals. The first condition for a smooth-running social order in respect for it ~ Page 202

7 months ago / 33 visits

. . . . all medieval towns had a few common characteristics. Walls enclosed the town. (The terms ‘burgher’ and bourgeois” derive from the Old English and Old German words ‘burg,’ ‘ borg,’ and ‘borough’ for “a walled or fortified place.”

16 months ago / 47 visits

“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”

21 months ago / 57 visits

Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens : Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain ~ Friedrich Schiller

21 months ago / 55 visits

. . . The natural processes which makes human life possible cannot be described as ‘evil’, even if their effects are left in human suffering. This is an idea with an ancient pedigree: when Seneca writes on the propriety of natural processes, he is at pains to conclude that if you don’t like the suff…

22 months ago / 65 visits

Dawkins believes that “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976) and Csikszentmihalyi urges us to “achieve control” over our minds, desires and actions. “If you let them be controlled by genes and memes, you are missing the opportunity to be yoursel…

2 years ago / 59 visits

“la verite surgit de la meprise” ~ Only from this error does the truth come forth” {the truth emerges from the contempt}

2 years ago / 65 visits

Libet en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet distinguishes between the action as a physical act and the urge to act as a mental phenomenon. We can control our actions but not our urges, he concludes. ~ Excerpt “The User Illusion”

2 years ago / 68 visits