“Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” — Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
“Yet if a student can – and this is most difficult and unusual – draw back, get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion. — Indignation is the soul’s defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. — Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics.” — Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
“Relax. Look around. Make a call.” — Jocko Willink
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” — Yeats
“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!” — Richard Feynman
“So it’s thanks to that Magna Carta
that was signed with the barons of old
that in England today we can do as we like — so long as we do as we’re told.” — recalled by Alan Watts
“We can’t slap trigger warnings all over the last ten thousand years because Hobbes was right––it was all pretty nasty and brutish.” — Wheal
Whiteness is also a bizarre and recent construction, and insisting achronically that it is pervasive, timeless and eternal, and underpins all of Western Civilization, does grave injustice to Persians, Egyptians, Hindus, Slavs, Celts, Roma, Semites (both Arab and Jewish), and hundreds of other civilizations whose fingerprints are all over the “Western Canon.” — Jamie Wheal
“Who knows only his own generation remains forever a child.” — Churchill
“He never exhibited rudeness, lost control of himself, or turned violent. No one ever saw him sweat. Everything was to be approached logically and with due consideration, in a calm and orderly fashion but decisively, with no loose ends.”
“Action is a test of learning, but only the learner can know the motive or the out come of the tests.” — James Zull
“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.” — Hegel
“Only by the creation of change can I perceive something.” — Gregory Bateson
“Don’t talk about your philosophy, embody it.” -Epictetus