All knowledge pursued merely for the enrichment of personal learning and the accumulation of personal treasure leads you away from the path; but all knowledge pursued for growth to ripeness within the process of human ennoblement and cosmic developme...
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any a...
Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.
Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.
It may well be that an analysis of figures would reveal a law - the duration of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. Or, to put it another way, any union celebrated with personalized toasting flutes is doomed.
Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.
We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self.
That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children's science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unre...
The great men of all areas of humanity’s activities never tried to be a better version of someone else. They simply brought to the table a full life's cultivation of their particular skill sets, experiences, and passions, and we must do the same.
The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.
The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.
... the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe. This was one of the great inventions in this history of mankind -- not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural val...
Indications, of course, are not enough. Knowledge of the time must be combined with obedience -- what social scientists like to call time discipline. The indications are in effect commands, for responsiveness to these cues is imprinted on us and we i...
If in doubt, keep quiet. Play safe, talk less, and observe.
Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.
A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on ear...
Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.… Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger f...
What a person has is of no consequence, whether much or little, when it comes to the deep satisfaction of the soul. Apart from Christ, the rich and beautiful, and the poor and unlovely, will all end up in precisely the same misery.
The failure of the roman system to furnish decent minimal standards for the mass of people was a fundamental cause of instability, both political and economic.
[A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades--no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer.
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
