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  • Utopia/Next is Benevolent Authoritarianism, then Noble Savage, etc.

    A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. — Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

    The tremendous transformations of the war have breathed new life into the idea of a utopia… – Otto Neurath, 1919

    The doctrine of the perfectibility of man can now be reformulated thus: all men are capable of being perfected, and to a degree that has no limit. — John Passmore

    that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, Marquis de Condorcet

    Their clothing – which is, except for the distinction between the sexes and between married and unmarried persons, the same throughout the whole island and throughout one’s lifetime, and which is by no means unattractive – Thomas More, Utopia

    The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement. – William Godwin

    It is impossible that a man should perpetrate a crime in the moment that he sees it in all its enormity. – William Godwin

    The fundamental principle of all morality about which I have reasoned in all my Writings and developed in this last one with all the clarity of which I was capable, is that man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and that the Wrst movements of nature are always right. I have shown that the only passion born with man, namely love of self,23 is a passion in itself indifferent to good and evil; that it becomes good or bad only by accident and depending on the circumstances in which it develops. I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; – Rousseau

    “There must in the nature of things be one best form of government, which all intellects, sufficiently roused from the slumber of savage ignorance, will be irresistibly incited to approve.” – William Godwin (cf. Maistre, Burke, Oakeshott)

    “These sciences, almost created today, whose object is man himself, whose direct goal is man’s happiness, will have a course no less certain than that of the physical sciences; In meditating on the nature of the moral sciences, one cannot help but see that, like the physical sciences, based on the observation of facts, they must follow the same method, acquire an equally exact and precise language, reach the same degree of certainty. Everything would be equal for a being who, foreign to our species, studied human society, as we study that of beavers or bees. But here, the observer is himself part of the society he observes, and the truth can only have judges, either prejudiced or seduced.      The progress of the moral sciences will therefore be slower than that of the physical sciences, and we should not be surprised if the principles on which they are established need to force, so to speak, minds to receive them,

    Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy … cities will never have rest from their evils,—no, nor the human race, as I believe,—and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day – Plato

  • TESTING CHRON QUOTES

    200

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  • The Duality of Man

    What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?1 — William Shakespeare

    Full of wiles, full of guile, at all times, in all ways,
    Are the children of Men.    2 — Aristophanes

    Mankind, fleet of life, like tree leaves, weak creatures of clay, unsubstantial as shadows, wingless, ephemeral, wretched, mortal and dreamlike.3 — Aristophanes

    Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none
    More wonderful than man; the storm gray sea
    Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high;
    Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven
    With shining furrows where his plows have gone
    Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions.

    The light-boned birds and beasts that cling to cover,
    The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water,
    All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind;
    The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned,
    Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken
    The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull.

    Words also, and thought as rapid as air,
    He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his
    And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow,
    The spears of winter rain: from every wind
    He has made himself secure–from all but one:
    In the late wind of death he cannot stand.

    O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!
    O fate of man, working both good and evil!
    When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands!
    When the laws are broken, what of his city then?
    Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth,
    Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts!    4 — Sophocles

    What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?5 — Blaise Pascal

    The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us!6 — Ennius

    We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.7 — Shakespeare

    People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.8 — Fyodor Dostoevsky

    Surely there is nothing more wretched than a man, of all the things which breathe and move upon the earth.9 — Homer

    Reason is God’s crowning gift to man.10 — Sophocles’ Antigone

    What has ruinous Time not tainted?
    Our parents’ age, worse than their ancestors’,
    Bore us, less worthy,
    soon to bear Children
    still unworthier.    11 — Horace’s Odes

    Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.12 — Blaise Pascal

    Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.13 — Blaise Pascal

    What is man, that thou art mindful of him?… thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.14 — Psalm 8

    The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.15 — Matthew 26:41

    But man, proud man, / Dress’d in a little brief authority… / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep. (remove?)

    Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, / A being darkly wise and rudely great; / With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, / With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride… / Born but to die, and reasoning but to err.16 — Alexander Pope

    Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman— a rope over an abyss.17 — Nietzsche

    Two souls, alas! are dwelling in my breast.18 — Goethe

    I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself…19 — Montaigne

    Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.20 — Immanuel Kant.

    Sources:

    1. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.327 ↩︎
    2. Aristophanes, Birds, l. 451 ↩︎
    3. Aristophanes, Birds, l. 685 ↩︎
    4. Sophocles, Antigone, l. 333 ↩︎
    5. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 434 ↩︎
    6. Ennius ↩︎
    7. Shakespeare ↩︎
    8. Fyodor Dostoevsky ↩︎
    9. Homer, Iliad, XVII, l. 446 ↩︎
    10. Sophocles, Antigone ↩︎
    11. Horace, Odes ↩︎
    12. Blaise Pascal, Pensées. ↩︎
    13. Blaise Pascal, Pensées. ↩︎
    14. The Book of ↩︎
    15. Book of Matthew ↩︎
    16. Alexander Pope, ↩︎
    17. Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ↩︎
    18. Goethe, Faust, I. ↩︎
    19. Montaigne ↩︎
    20. Immanuel Kant ↩︎

  • Fallibility of Planning

    There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.1 — H. L. Mencken

    The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.2 — Robert Burns’

    Man proposes; God disposes.

    Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.3 Mike Tyson

    “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.4 — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder No war plan extends beyond the first military engagement with the hostile main forces.

    Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.5 Eisenhower

    Napoleon quote, searching, overthinking, “long have I studied war plans, but on the day of battle I throw those all away and act” something like that

    There are many plans in a man’s heart,
    Nevertheless the Lord’s counsel—that will stand. Proverbs 19:21

    Hayek’s arguments against central planning could fit here as well

    Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.5 Truculentus, act IV, sc. iv, l. 15

    The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken. — GEORGE HERBERT, Jacula Prudentum [1651] The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole / Can never be a mouse of any soul. — ALEXANDER POPE, Paraphrase of the Prologue [1714], l. 298

    It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.” — Publilius Syrus, Maxim 469.

    Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. — Publilius Syrus.

    When Fortune flatters, she does it to betray. — Publilius Syrus.

    So may it be that one man proposes, another disposes; and God who is over all does as he pleases. — Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. II, ch. 43

    1. H. L. Mencken, The Divine Afflatus ↩︎
    2. Robert Burns, To a Mouse ↩︎
    3. ↩︎
    4. Verbatim:No war plan extends beyond the first military engagement with the hostile main forces. ↩︎
    5. ↩︎

  • Politics and Truth

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    “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”1

    1. Source: Napoleon Bonaparte.

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  • War is Cruelty

    “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”1

    1. Source: William Tecumseh Sherman.

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    Sources

  • Love is Patient

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    “Love is patient, love is kind.”1

    1. Source: 1 Corinthians 13:4.

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