Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to elimi...
Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally com...
We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fig...
Everything is unfolding based on causes and conditions. Our happiness or suffering is dependent on how we relate to the present moment. If we cling now, we suffer later. If we let go and respond with compassion or friendliness, we create happiness an...
Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike...
Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the ...
What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them – that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions u...
Change is like a river: nothing is the same, even for an instant. Everything is continually moving through the six stages of change: about to come into being, beginning, expanding, approaching maximum potential, peaking, and finally, passing its peak...
Every plan in which we participate has one constant, ourselves. Not that we are always the same, but that we are always part of the plan. All else comes and goes: friends, parents, possessions, conditions, situations, and associates, leaving only us,...
Hat head is a sad affliction wherein the chosen hat and the selected hairstyle are grossly incompatible. The unfortunate combination results in a condition that can be hidden only with the application of another hat.
There were people who believed their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the number of Asians in England, by the existance of a royal family, by the volume of traffic that passed by their house, by the malice of trade unions, by t...
We preach and practice brotherhood — not only of man but of all living beings — not on Sundays only but on all the days of the week. We believe in the law of universal justice — that our present condition is the result of our past actions and t...
The one thing that remains permanently behind the times, especially because it prides itself on its steadfastness, is the human heart, most of all that of the conscientious man. The mind is never so hard, dry, and twisted as when it has a slight chro...
One of the most challenging aspects for those who are seeking to find the God of their understanding for the first time is His formlessness. It can be difficult to believe in, and connect with, something that cannot be seen. Perhaps this is because a...
In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social cond...
On some such night as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche; it had seemed to her then that she had only to will, and such a l...
Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate t...
Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard...
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought ...
There should be no single representation in the autism world. Think about this if someone got up on stage and talked about having “non-autistic syndrome” and made the assumption every one with this syndrome is the same we would be in big trouble....
Une éthique véritablement socialiste, c'est-à-dire qui cherche la justice sans supprimer la liberté, qui impose aux individus des charges mais sans abolir l'individualité, se trouvera fort embarrassée par les problèmes que pose la condition de...
