So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. [...] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend ...
With their concern for personal autonomy and individual freedom, anarchists more than any other socialists are aware of the inhumanity of both physical punishment and manipulative cure for anti-social members of the community. They look to reasoned a...
Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascer...
If only the know-how could be equalled by the will-to-serve, by compassion for human suffering cause by hunger and deficiency diseases, there is no reason why fully balanced diets consisting largely of plant-foods should not be made available for hun...
What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far...
I'll give you another example. The snake in the Garden of Eden?" "Yeah?" "It was just a snake. Humanity's first real decision was to defy God. So was mine. That's the reason I make you uncomfortable. We're so much alike.
The mass hallucination of the twentieth century is this: that all these national governments, which each year kill or threaten way more humans than they protect, and take a big chunk of your income to do so, are for some reason a great idea, an inevi...
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it...
If you held to principle so passionately, so inflexibly, indifferent in the particulars of circumstance - the full range of what human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, might endure or create - if you enthroned principle above even reason, we...
The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache of books. Writing a book is like loving someone. It can ...
Some people like me, some don't. I don't understand, Where the difference comes from. My heart like them all. For a simple childish reason. We all are created equal, we all are humans.
For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of s...
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someon...
I think one of the reasons I've had success in hip-hop is that I can bring out vulnerability in people who are generally seen as tough guys. To me, when a hip-hop musician always plays tough, I find it annoying because I know they're not really like ...
I still wonder how policy officials... can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enoug...
There are cultural reasons, economic competitiveness reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people are in poverty. The difference today is that increasingly they are in perpetual poverty.
Vincent: There's no good reason, there's no bad reason to live or to die. Max: Then what are you? Vincent: I'm indifferent.
Reasons? There are no reasons.
No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.
A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. During ...
The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not...
