Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.’ The Director interrupted himself. ‘You know what Polish is, I suppose?’ ‘A dead language.
If you’re a human being, you’ll be seeing something of both, because we’ve always wanted things both ways.
Truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it’s been beneficent.
What’s the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn’t the rationalization of your feelings? If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn’t been very good for truth of course. But it’s been very good for happiness.
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.
Individuals of one species are the same in essence or substance. Two human beings differ from one another in matter, but are the same in essence, as being both rational animals. The essential human quality which distinguishes the species Man from all other species is identical in both.
But men are not content merely desire; they like to have a logical or pseudo-logical justification for their desires; they like to believe that when they want something, it is not merely for their own personal advantage, but that their desires are dictated by pure reason, by nature, by God Himself.
Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated one from another by irreducible differences.
Let there be a voice to assure them, by day and even while they are asleep, that in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.
Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.
Feeling are communicated by means of ideas, which are their intellectual equivalent; at the sound of the words conveying the ideas the appropriate emotion is evoked.
Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.
New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.
Life is so constituted that we can make effective use of things whose nature we do not understand.
Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the sacle and of total control at the other.
We need not know a thing in order to be able to investigate and control it. Where knowledge is absent – and in an absolute sense we can know nothing – a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even philosophical purposes.
The mind is its own place; she carried her hell about with her.
To understand sympathetically, with one’s whole beings, the state of mind of some one radically unlike oneself is very difficult – is, so far as I am concerned, impossible.
One must have some basis of experience on which to build an imagination.