34 quotes
We want to know not merely what men have been, even the best men of their day, but what men can and ought to be.
The New Patricians (1998)
The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values.
The New Patricians (1998)
Success necessarily emasculates the spirit of rebellion. From the point of view of the true rebel the noblest cause is a lost cause.
The New Patricians (1998)
Far from invalidating the ideal, the fact that men’s behaviours is in opposition to it invalidates their behaviour. We measure the cloth by the yardstick, not the yardstick by the cloth.
The New Patricians (1998)
Our ridicule and disgust are in the end aimed at some unavowed part of our own selves.
The New Patricians (1998)
Let us now shrink from parodying Hegel, and state that for our patrician ‘the romantic is the real, the real the romantic’.
The New Patricians (1998)
If we live in a plebeianized world, it is because so many human beings have busied themselves making a world fir only for plebeians to live in.
The New Patricians (1998)
His [the plebeian’s] aim is not to teach, to correct error, but to disturb, to unsettle, to sow disillusioning seeds in the hope of spreading disillusionment as a rooted attitude of mind.
The New Patricians (1998)
It is possible to expose cowardly and degenerate hypocrisy in the name of true heroism and purity of spirit. But it is also possible to spatter mud on genuine heroes out of hatred for heroism.
The New Patricians (1998)
It is nether fortune, status, nor power, nor even intellect, which marks out the Patrician, but intensity of consciousness and the resolve to pursue only what is truly worth pursuing.
The New Patricians (1998)
The plebeian asks himself, ‘What type of person am I?’, and he seeks the answer by comparing the self he believes he is with the norms enshrined in the manufactured packages on public offer.
The New Patricians (1998)
Men are admittedly social beings, language-using beings, tool-using beings, and so on. However, any serious philosophical anthropology has to recognize that first and foremost we are evaluating beings.
The New Patricians (1998)
The fundamental optimism which is an element of all true nobility … is obviously related to courage since it refuses to be discouraged in the face of what sometimes seems overwhelming evidence.
The New Patricians (1998)
The direction in which to look for the patrician is always upwards. This is because his nature is to aspire, to rise always higher—not necessarily to rise above others but to rise above where he himself has been and above things as he finds them.
The New Patricians (1998)
The true patrician distinguishes always between what he has to concern himself with, from stark necessity or the dictates of duty, and what he (and everyone else) ought ideally to be concerning himself with, in the proper realm to which he rightly belongs.
The New Patricians (1998)
For many years the best minds in moral philosophy have been less concerned with the content of morality than with its form, less with the actual truth of our many value judgements than with their logical standing.
The New Patricians (1998)
When we entrust the domain of values to those whose intellectual concerns are essentially centred on empirical facts, and whose conceptual frameworks are inevitably constructed around sets of empirical facts, we need not be surprised if the result is moral confusion.
The New Patricians (1998)
Ultimately, instead of inspecting life to see what we can find to suit us, we inspect ourselves to see what we can find that fits us to receive the standardized packages in which our life-experience is going to arrive.
The New Patricians (1998)
The common result is … that the common man comes to feel vindicated in his commonness, and jeeringly turns his back on everything he apprehends as a summons to lift himself up to more challenging levels of personality.
The New Patricians (1998)
The patrician … has the courage to listen to and retain whatever may be glorious in the ambiguous revelations that are being offered to him; he is resolved to miss nothing, to plumb every depth and scale every height, in the pilgrimage of his consciousness.
The New Patricians (1998)