35 quotes
He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. …
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
In the hisness of property we have dogma; there discussion ends.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, that wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
When masses of men reach a point at which egotism reigns so blandly, can their political damnation be far off? They have rejected their only guarantee against external control, which is self-discipline, taught and practiced.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, or an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to a happier condition.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
Plato was disturbed by written discourse because … if an individual goes to it with a question in his mind, it “always gives one unvarying answer.”
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
At this point I would make abundantly clear that the last metaphysical right offers nothing in defense of that kind of property brought into being by finance capitalism. Such property is, on the contrary, a violation of the very notion of proprietas.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)
The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace, and there is no surer way to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.
Ideas have Consequences (1948)