Solid Quotes in No Particular Order

  • Neil is talking about a potential comic book in which there is a Trump-like president.  Then Amartya asks what the name of the president is Neil says, “I don’t know”. Amartya then suggests orange chicken because that’s what he had for lunch that day.
  • The Christianity that Dawkins objects to is the Christianity that a smart 13-year old boy objects to. – Dr. Jordan B Peterson
  • There is no answer to the problem of life–the solution is the disappearance of the problem. – Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • “Ours is the responsibility, but in the long run we serve progress just as you do. We only hold together what you are unsettling, and what, but for us, would go to pieces in all directions. We are not your enemies, not a bit of it. We say to you, go forward, progress, you may even unsettle things, that is, things that are antiquated and in need of reform. But we will keep you, when need is, within necessary limits, and so save you from yourselves, for without us you would set Russia tottering, robbing her of all external decency. Understand that we are mutually essential to one another. In England, the Whigs and Tories are in the same way mutually essential to one another. Well, you’re Whigs and we’re Tories. That’s how I look at it.” -Andrey Antonovich von Lembke –Fyodor Dostoevsky Demons, 1871-2

  • “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love” – Dostoevsky
  • It also seemed clear that Platonism had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable. -Rorty on Wild Orchids

Friedrich Hayek

  • On Economists Need to Specialize: “In the study of society exclusive concentration on a specialty has a peculiarly baneful effect: it will not merely prevent us from being attractive company or good citizens but may impair our competence
    in our proper field. . . . The physicist who is only a physicist can still be a first-class physicist and a most valuable member of society. But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist—and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.” in “The Dilemma of Specialization”

William James

  • On Religious Experience: Even the personally non-religious might accept its conclusions on trust, much as a blind person accepts the facts of optics-it might appear as foolish to refuse them.
  • On Pascal’s Wager: A game is going on between you and the nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either heads or tails. 
  • On the Strenuous Mood: In a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up.
  • On the Spineless: There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean…The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line.
  • On Habit as a Conservative Agent: Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop,’ in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
  • On Hegel: The insolence of sway, the hubris on which gods take vengeance, is in temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an intellect is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod over the whole?

Lord of the Rings

  • Faramir smiled. ‘A pert servant, Master Samwise. But nay: the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards. Yet there was naught in this to praise. I had no lure or desire to do other than I have done. – The Two Tower, Book IV: Chapter IV, The Window on the West
  • ‘I [Gandalf] looked then and saw that his [Saruman’s] robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours. and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

    ‘ “I liked white better,” I said.

    ‘ “White! ” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

    ‘ “In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” 

    – The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2: Chapter II, The Council of Elrond

  • “Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.”
    – Gandalf – The Two Towers, Book 3: Chapter  5, The White Rider