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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dab9abc | In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism - not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of th.. | left-liberalism liberal liberalism social-justice | Roger Scruton | |
| d4f98e8 | nacionalismo, como uma ideologia, e perigoso apenas a medida que as ideologias sao perigosas. Ocupa o espaco deixado vago pela religiao e, ao faze-lo, estimula o verdadeiro crente a venerar a ideia nacionalista e a buscar nesta concepcao aquilo que ela nao pode oferecer -- o proposito ultimo da vida, o caminho da redencao e o consolo para todas as aflicoes. | conservadorismo | Roger Scruton | |
| 5720134 | The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 1e65558 | If I am right, then enjoying music involves a kind of outward-going sympathetic movement. In music, as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is a culture of idolatry, in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response. As I argued in the previous chapter, there is every r.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 5071a08 | While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as ethnocentric and even racist. | edwardsaid liberal liberalism westernculture | Roger Scruton | |
| 48efd01 | The term persona comes to us from the Roman and Etruscan theater, where it denoted the mask worn by the actor and therefore the character whom the actor portrayed. The term was borrowed by Roman law to describe any entity that has judiciable rights and duties, including corporate entities and other more abstract constructions. It was borrowed again by early Christian theologians in order to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, by distinguis.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 03ba270 | Durkheim pointed out that you don't merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it, and that disputes over religious doctrine are, as a rule, not simply arguments about abstruse questions of metaphysics but attempts to give a viable test of membership, and hence a way of identifying and excluding the heretics who threaten the community from within. Religion | Roger Scruton | ||
| 39df031 | At the same time, there flourished around them an equally remarkable, and for us more interesting, defiance of the Calvinist spirit: the art and culture of the Netherlands, in which man's relation to the world of objects, and to his own physical life, became the subject of a profound spiritual interrogation. | netherlands | Roger Scruton | |
| b81472c | Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. It's binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love. Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and recieving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit our not ours to spoil. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 417ef73 | The laws of physics, which govern the behaviour of atoms and the movements of the stars, govern also the conduct of rational beings. And yet: Being is still enchanted for us; in a hundred Places it remains a source - a play of pure Powers, which touches no one, who does not kneel and wonder. Words still go softly forth towards the unsayable. And music, always new, from palpitating stones Builds in useless space its godly home. [Rilke, .. | realism sacred | Roger Scruton | |
| e4c520f | We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza's thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism. | muslim spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 7ae48cd | From this state of bewildered scepticism the student may take a leap of faith. And the leap is never backwards into the old curriculum, the old canon, the old belief in objective standards and settled ways of life. It is always a leap forward, into the world of free choice and free opinion, in which nothing has authority and nothing is objectively right or wrong. In this postmodern world there is no such things as adverse judgement - unless.. | humanities political-correctness | Roger Scruton | |
| 977a3c6 | Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice. | Roger Scruton | ||
| e172171 | Religious quarrels,' he added, 'do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men's various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them habitually to distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 73a87a9 | And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 8d1ff03 | Throughout the proofs of the , therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 0a5e0fe | The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as 'a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opinions'. Since the fundamental assumptions behind their two systems are profoundly similar, it is perhaps not surprising that the two philosophers - whose conclusions are wholly opposed - should have treated each other with a certain caution. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| c9bfc6c | In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| b70a1d3 | The seclusion of Spinoza's life was necessitated by intense labour and intellectual discipline, and his frugality expressed independence of spirit rather than meanness or self-concern. The strength of Spinoza's social feelings, and his Aristotelian emphasis on friendship as a necessary human good, are abundantly shown in the Ethics. | Roger Scruton | ||
| c3180d9 | While Spinoza did not condemn marriage, he rejected it for himself, perhaps fearing the 'ill temper of a woman', and in any case recognizing in matrimony a threat to his scholarly interests. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| dbeaca5 | By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty - these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us. It is in terms of them that we attempt to articulate the fundamental togetherness that mitigates social rivalries, whether of class, status or economic role. Hence it has always been a vital.. | hobsbawm invented-tradition | Roger Scruton | |
| fb5b384 | Accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. | Roger Scruton | ||
| e635d06 | The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same: the supreme good which consists in the adequate knowledge of God | scientist spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 4a457ce | There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women. | Sheryl Sandberg | ||
| 8892551 | To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death he was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century. | spinoza | Roger Scruton | |
| 96e9484 | Many social and political changes have swept the world clean of the apprehension of sacred things: the rejection of custom and ceremony; the conversion of marriage into a defeasible contract; the relaxing of the laws governing, sexual conduct and obscenity; the decline of faith and saintliness. As those changes take their effect, the experience of erotic love becomes darigerous and uncertain in its outcome. Our responsibility retreats furth.. | love sacred | Roger Scruton | |
| a30dd25 | Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 9f53b24 | No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us, insisting all the while that what he is doing is the same as what he has always done. We cannot establish, once and for all, and with no possibility of doubt, that another really does understand a word as we do -- whether that word be 'he' or.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 892849f | As soon as another person becomes important to us, so that we feel in our lives the gravitational pull of his existence, we are to a certain extent astonished by his individuality. From time to time we pause in his presence, and allow the incomprehensible fact of his being in the world to dawn on us. And if we love him and trust him, and feel the comfort of his companionship, then our sentiment, in these moments, is like the sentiment of be.. | gravity individuality love uniqueness | Roger Scruton | |
| 0c852d6 | For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan. | paranoia politics reality zero-sum-game | Roger Scruton | |
| bcdba1a | Value begins where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange. | Roger Scruton | ||
| fcb8e8a | The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable. For Kant, the virtuous man is so much the master of his passions as scarcely to be prompted by them, and so far indifferent to power and reputation as to regard their significance as nothing beside that of duty itself. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 8e7e01f | the power of jealousy is one of the most important facts to be taken account of in the derivation of sexual morality. In a world where sexual prohibitions are of diminishing force, we should not be surprised that so many people take refuge from jealousy in the avoidance of love. For where love exists, the price of sexual freedom is suffering. | Roger Scruton | ||
| b214c1b | Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 74af6c5 | Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 4478659 | Eimaste plasmata pou katadunasteuomaste apo to soma,apo tis epithumies mas.Omos mas plettoun kai mas plegonoun exoterikoi paragontes kai egklobizomaste mesa sto sustema tou aitiou kai tou apotelesmatos.Upo autes tis sunthekes uparkhei mia mono alethine sophia ki aute einai na megalosoume te duname mas,kai na epibebaiosoume,oso auto einai dunaton,pos o,ti mas sumbainei to ekhoume prokalesei emeis oi idioi. | Roger Scruton | ||
| d8c84b2 | The bitter thought against which Don Juan hopelessly rebels is the same thought that contains the promise of Tristan's consolation: the thought of death. Don Juanism and Tristanism are extreme responses to a perception that lies at the root of human attraction and human love: the thought of our common mortality. | love | Roger Scruton | |
| 38bbcc7 | But what you do with another person's beauty? The satisfied lover is as little able to possess the beauty of his beloved as the one who hopelessly observes it from afar. | love lover possess satisfied | Roger Scruton | |
| 5474283 | I count myself among those who owe a great debt to The Concept of Mind. When it was published I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. The book was drawn to my attention by Dr (now Bishop) Alan Clark, then Ripetitore in philosophy at the Venerable English College in Rome. I found its style exhilaratingly different from that of the scholastic textbooks which were prescribed in the courses of my Pontif.. | aristotle ryle | Anthony Kenny | |
| 689f986 | Philosophy is linguistic' may mean at least six different things. (1) The study of language is a useful philosophical tool. (2) It is the only philosophical tool. (3) Language is the only subject matter of philosophy. (4) Necessary truths are established by linguistic convention. (5) Man is fundamentally a language using animal. (6) Everyday language has a status of privilege over technical and formal systems. These six propositions are ind.. | language philosophy | Anthony Kenny | |
| 1908675 | Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of organizing what is known. | Anthony Kenny | ||
| 0bb8443 | In the period between Homer and Socrates most philosophers wrote in verse, and Plato, writing in the great age of Athenian tragedy and comedy, composed dramatic dialogue. Aristotle, an exact contemporary of the greatest Greek orator Demosthenes, preferred to write in prose monologue. | Anthony Kenny | ||
| 62925a0 | From my vantage point in a busy working kitchen, when I'd see Emeril and Bobby on the tube, they looked like creatures from another planet--bizarrely, artificially cheerful creatures in a candy-colored galaxy in no way resembling my own. They were as far from my experience or understanding as Barney the purple dinosaur--or the saxophone stylings of Kenny G. The fact that people--strangers--seemed to love them, Emeril's studio audience, for .. | Anthony Bourdain | ||
| 9e349a4 | You have to be a man to be a big leaguer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too. | Baseball |