April 2nd, 2012 
Once the anchor of reason has been cut, one’s craft may go anywhere. One may become a St Francis or equally a Hitler.
Brand Blanshard
Archive for the ‘Philosopher’ Category
Brand Blanshard
Allan Bloom
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
Allan Bloom
The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.
Allan Bloom
Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
Allan Bloom
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
Allan Bloom
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
Allan Bloom
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
Allan Bloom
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
Allan Bloom
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise… specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
Allan Bloom
Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
Allan Bloom
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
Allan Bloom
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Allan Bloom
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan Bloom
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.
Allan Bloom
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
Allan Bloom
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Allan Bloom
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
Allan Bloom
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
Allan Bloom
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom
Boethius
Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.
Boethius
Nothing is miserable unless you think it is so.
Boethius
Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.
Boethius
A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.
Boethius
For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.
Boethius
If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?
Boethius
Sissela Bok
We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.
Sissela Bok
Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.
Sissela Bok
While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.
Sissela Bok
H. P. Blavatsky
Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.
H. P. Blavatsky
Everything that is, was, and will be, eternally IS, even the countless forms, which are finite and perishable only in their objective, not in their ideal Form.
H. P. Blavatsky
If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them.
H. P. Blavatsky
Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate deity.
H. P. Blavatsky
It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead.
H. P. Blavatsky
As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man’s external body can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested Universe.
H. P. Blavatsky
It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them.
H. P. Blavatsky
The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.
H. P. Blavatsky
But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of.
H. P. Blavatsky
Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green.
H. P. Blavatsky
The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards.
H. P. Blavatsky
Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.
H. P. Blavatsky
The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life.
H. P. Blavatsky
We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind.
H. P. Blavatsky
Annie Besant
Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.
Annie Besant
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
Annie Besant
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
Annie Besant
Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.
Annie Besant
For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
Annie Besant
Isaiah Berlin
The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.
Isaiah Berlin
Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
Isaiah Berlin
Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.
Isaiah Berlin
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
Isaiah Berlin
The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
Isaiah Berlin
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.
Isaiah Berlin
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
Isaiah Berlin
To understand is to perceive patterns.
Isaiah Berlin
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance – these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
Isaiah Berlin
The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.
Isaiah Berlin
Andrew Bernstein
Nothing is given to man on earth – struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible – the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.
Andrew Bernstein
A hero holds purposes appropriate to man and is, therefore, a thinker.
Andrew Bernstein
First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.
Andrew Bernstein
A hero has faced it all: he need not be undefeated, but he must be undaunted.
Andrew Bernstein
George Berkeley
So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
George Berkeley
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
George Berkeley
All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth – in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world – have not any subsistence without a mind.
George Berkeley
From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.
George Berkeley
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
George Berkeley
He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
George Berkeley
I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
George Berkeley
That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man.
George Berkeley
A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.
George Berkeley
If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.
George Berkeley
The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it.
George Berkeley
We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
George Berkeley
The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.
George Berkeley
Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.
George Berkeley
Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
George Berkeley
Jeremy Bentham
The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day’s time they will have turned it into a Hell.
Jeremy Bentham
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
Jeremy Bentham
As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.
Jeremy Bentham
Every law is an infraction of liberty.
Jeremy Bentham
The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but rather, “Can they suffer?”
Jeremy Bentham
He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn.
Jeremy Bentham
The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.
Jeremy Bentham
It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.
Jeremy Bentham
Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.
Jeremy Bentham
The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.
Jeremy Bentham
All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil.
Jeremy Bentham
It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.
Jeremy Bentham
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Jeremy Bentham
The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
Jeremy Bentham
Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.
Jeremy Bentham
Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
Jeremy Bentham
No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.
Jeremy Bentham
