It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, “Who are we?”
~ Erwin Schrödinger
:::
Wherever religion is resorted to as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull, monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please.
~ Charles Dickens
:::
A former colleague of mine liked to say that there are certain ideas that vanish in the presence of thought. Among those ideas is settler colonialism — or rather, the invidious, hypocritical and historically illiterate way in which it is often denounced in anti-Israel polemics and protests.
~ Brett Stephens via The New York Times
:::
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
:::
Designs fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative
objects nor works of art.
~ Dieter Rams
:::
Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.
~ Donella Meadows
:::
In our civilized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lies with the people; I must go to them directly. I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian.
~ Gustave Courbet
:::
Neutrality has increasingly become obsolete and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.
~ John Foster Dulles
:::
I don’t think we do a service to anyone to pretend that technology does not eliminate some jobs. Some jobs it just makes much better. But the arc of this has been that every technological revolution eliminates one class, one sets of jobs, and we find new ones on the other side that are hard to imagine from where we sit today.
~ Sam Altman
:::
Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.
~ Roger Scruton
:::