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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c5d91ba | Cielo, l'amore era un tormento. Chiunque avesse affermato il contrario non doveva aver mai provato quel maledetto fremito nel petto. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| aa252c5 | Come se ogni volta, fra le pagine, rimanesse attaccato qualcosa: sensazioni, pensieri, rumori, odori... E quando a distanza di anni li riapri, ritrovi te stesso, un po' piu giovane, un po' diverso, quasi il libro ti avesse conservato come un fiore fatto seccare tra le pagine... un po' estraneo e un po' familiare.>> | Cornelia Funke | ||
| dd14181 | Who's born to hang will never drown. | At Swim, Two Boys | ||
| f193326 | The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. | Louis Menand | ||
| e7e3c34 | Holmes writes, "...I also would fight for some things--but instead of saying that they ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like--or should like." | Louis Menand | ||
| 6445158 | From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James's particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French.. | Louis Menand | ||
| c3a210f | Darwin's ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them. | Louis Menand | ||
| 3412eb8 | Quatelet's first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a 'law' governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the society and not with the individual criminal. 'It is society that prepares the crime and ... the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,' is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People who murder--like people who marry and peopl.. | Louis Menand | ||
| 03148f9 | According to Peirce] 'The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.' ... nominalism denies the social altogether ... 'the community is to be considered as an end in itself'... knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals ... Logic is rooted in the social principle. | Louis Menand | ||
| 49996bf | What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations that are compatible with survival are reproduced; variations that are incompatible are weeded out. A tiny deviation from the norm in the outcome of a physical process can, over the long run, produce a new physical law. Laws are adaptive. | Louis Menand | ||
| b042e23 | Addams] found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions--the assumption, for instance, that the reformer's tastes or values are superior to the reformee's, or, more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who h.. | Louis Menand | ||
| 3004148 | If behaving as thought we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true. | Louis Menand | ||
| baa7562 | If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true. | Louis Menand | ||
| 9ef56a4 | No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds. | Louis Menand | ||
| fed1247 | Peirce's theory of signs--there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all. | Louis Menand | ||
| 0747db7 | For Peirce, inquiry is always communal--it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star--and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce's cosmology, everyone's beliefs have to be the same in the end, because all opinion must converge. | Louis Menand | ||
| b035953 | In a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have been successfully mounted. | Louis Menand | ||
| 3b5a0e3 | In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. | Louis Menand | ||
| add80ab | According to Holmes], 'Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death. | Louis Menand | ||
| 22e3dc8 | We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. | Louis Menand | ||
| 2a5cc03 | good & universal (or general law) are synonymous terms in the universe.... | Louis Menand | ||
| 03eabf1 | The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in education. | Louis Menand | ||
| 55d8ab3 | He defended them because he believed that every social interest should have its chance. | Louis Menand | ||
| 6ef0f64 | When you know that you know persecution comes easy. | Louis Menand | ||
| 2bdc644 | When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, on January 1, 1863, Abbott wrote from the front to his aunt to explain that "[t]he president's proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan't see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution." | Louis Menand | ||
| 65a3bc2 | He believed that "a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, ... will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections."31" | Louis Menand | ||
| 52d790e | I think you are hopeful because (excuse me) you are ignorant. | Louis Menand | ||
| 1770c18 | Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln's firing of McClellan, who, despite his poor showing in the field, was widely respected as a military professional. These are the views reflected in Holmes's letter. They were Copperhead views, but one did not need to be a Democrat in the fall of 1862 to share them. | Louis Menand | ||
| 61241f0 | James's general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is "by nature inferior to man. She is man's inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength"; she is, very properly, her husband's "patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass, his cook, his tailor, his own cheerful nurse and the sleepless guardian of his children." But their infe.. | Louis Menand | ||
| d2bbfd4 | For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone--when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will--then only will you have achieved. | Louis Menand | ||
| b1cb70b | knowledge is cut off from the activity in which it has its meaning, and becomes a false abstraction. | Louis Menand | ||
| 44ca293 | We do not (on Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought--even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours. | Louis Menand | ||
| ca74fb6 | The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods o.. | Louis Menand | ||
| 7c0dac0 | the indeterminacy of individual behavior can be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass. | Louis Menand | ||
| 700c330 | Mere mouthpieces of a party, take away the party & they shrivel & vanish. | Louis Menand | ||
| a859aa7 | confused begging of some philosophical question, | Louis Menand | ||
| 72ca93b | Abbott had also impressed on Holmes, possibly by his conversation but certainly by his example, the belief that nobility of character consists in doing one's job with indifference to ends, | Louis Menand | ||
| 0d33411 | Holmes never mentions Abbott again in any of the war correspondence or the diaries that survive. | Louis Menand | ||
| 0557ad7 | organized study deadens the mind, and that genuine insight arises spontaneously from the individual soul. | Louis Menand | ||
| 4ff29ef | when we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are. | Louis Menand | ||
| 42ab57e | that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. | Louis Menand | ||
| 1f23134 | active habit involving an exertion of will. | Louis Menand | ||
| 105bbca | All that can be expected from modern improvements is that legislation should easily and quickly, yet not too quickly, modify itself in accordance with the will of the de facto supreme power in the community, | Louis Menand | ||
| 273f852 | successful people, like Morgan and Rockefeller, just had a better grasp of social tendencies than unsuccessful people | Louis Menand |