Civilization, or “the system” or “society” or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance.
The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.
Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.
The real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
Quality tends to fan out like waves.
Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
It’s not the ‘nice’ guy who brings about real social change. ‘Nice’ guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the ‘bad’ guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.
Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
Between the subject and the object lies the value.
A thing that has no value does not exist.
It’s better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.