It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.
So your theory would seem to be that lying to yourself is no lie at all because you haven’t deceived any third party. And if you then convince yourself of those lies, you’ll believe them enough to repeat them to other with the genuine conviction ...
Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
...So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness...
[In case of zombie uprising] Marxists and Feminists would likely sympathize more with zombies. To Marxists, the undead symbolize the oppressed proletariat. Unless the zombies were all undead white males, feminists would likely welcome the posthuman s...
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing int...
I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.
You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.
True gratitude, not mere verbal platitudes of thanks, is also a power in and of itself, which bursts forth from our inner being to the universe. Having received this power, the universe must respond, allowing more gifts to come our way.
Only by helping yourself first can you help the poor. Only by changing yourself first, can you change their condition. You achieve this by first removing from your mind any thoughts of poverty, for to think of something is to invoke it.
You cannot give out a negative frequency, that of disrespect, and expect respect to flow toward you. Neither can you hold on to your biases, prejudices and negative thinking toward something, and expect that something positive will return to you.
The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.
English law in the 15th and 16th centuries, despite being manipulated in favour of the king, did to some extent offer protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Death sentences could in theory only be imposed after lawful judgment. Slavery...
To attempt to build up theories of art, or to form a new style, would be an act of supreme folly. It would be at once to reject the experiences and accumulated knowledge of thousands of years. On the contrary, we should regard as our inheritance all ...
What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionar...
Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United State...
I've got a theory, it could be bunnies... I've got a theor- Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes They've got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses. And what's with all the carrots-? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? Bunn...
To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physi...
Children discover and verify their theories in quite the same way that scientists do: through experimentation. They manipulate the world and discover regularities of causation from those manipulations. Why do they do it? The discovery of regularities...
It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big “IF”—then you...
