Quotes from Arthur Herman

Like the Sun King, all of them turned their nation's printing presses and church pulpits into royalist propaganda machines. What was then "the mainstream media" routinely pointed to the monarch as an essential link in the Great Chain of Being, the center of a divinely preordained and fixed order. A king was more than just a political leader. Heaven had placed him on the throne not only to be obeyed, but to be loved and revered.

If we want to know what a man really is, we need to focus not on where he came from or what he left behind, but on what he can do now and in the future, as part of his own dynamic nature. What applies to individual dogs and men can be extended to human beings in general. For Aristotle's disciples in the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, it even applies to entire societies. In the Aristotelian mind-set, it is the future that counts, not the past.

Strato the Physicist. His appointment sent a clear signal that the natural and physical sciences would be the Lyceum's focus in the future, just as ethics and formal philosophy would be the future focus at the Academy.

Aristotle and Plato would have dismissed this kind of obsequious language as unworthy of free men. By the seventeenth century, however, it had become commonplace. It was also a lie.

John Locke. Now Locke was destroying every trace of his associations and activities in the alleged plot against King Charles II—everything, that is, except a particular manuscript. He took it with him as he left Somerset for the coast. The remaining papers Locke sent to a friend: "What you dislike," he wrote, "you may burn.

for Aristotle the world we make for ourselves continually reflects that constant striving toward improvement. In that sense, Aristotle is the first great advocate of progress—and Plato, creator of the vanished utopia Atlantis, the first great theorist of the idea of decline.21

As a member and then director of the Lyceum, Strato made two crucial decisions for the future of Western thought. The first was to insist that scientific research had to be free from any restraints by theology

And both were working on the same problem from different ends. This was figuring out how human beings fit into an infinite universe—and how we can salvage our freedom from the forces of blind necessity, in either the physical or the political realms. The answer they found was the nature of nature itself, as the product of a Beneficent Creator. Like Newton, behind nature and reason Locke always recognized the person and voice of God.

its passion for organizing and systematizing knowledge.

Some states banned the teaching of German in private and public schools alike.

Strato's arrival in that thriving port city was a landmark event in the history of Greek science. At one stroke Strato was leaving Athens, the ancient city of philosophers, intellectuals, and cosmopolitan aristocrats, for Alexandria, a new city of international businessmen, mathematicians, and engineers.

Locke's Two Treatises of Government revealed that the political universe is run the same way, through natural laws that guide men's behavior in the same sure way that they guide the movement of the planets.

Everyone and everything were becoming bricks in the comprehensive and complex edifice Aristotle was determined to build in order to reach the most profound truths. Those truths, as he made clear,† come not in a sudden moment of intuitive insight or from some inner contemplative process. They are the result of hard work and thought.

No other ancient city demonstrated so powerfully Aristotle's assertion that "a difference of capacities among its members enables them to attain a higher and better life by the mutual exchange of their different services." From that point of view alone, Alexandria was already Aristotle's city.

All of Aristotle's works point out, however, that the most vital knowledge we have comes a posteriori, meaning "after the fact" or from experience, as we link up a given visible effect to its preceding cause.

Aristotle insisted, the source of that justice is always the same: observation of the underlying order of nature.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs.

Paul Kennedy urged Western countries to strike a new North-South deal before they are finally overwhelmed by Fanon's wretched of the earth.14

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs. But somewhere, some basic principles have to stick.

Aristotle decided that Reality with a capital R is not (for the most part) something ultimately above or behind the world we see and hear and smell and touch. It is that world. What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

South Dakota even prohibited the use of the German language over the telephone.

The one principle Heraclitus did embrace was that of the Logos, which can be variously translated as the Word or the Spirit or the Reason or even the Way—in fact, the parallels between Heraclitus's Logos and the Chinese Tao are striking. By following the Logos, Heraclitus affirmed, which he saw as a kind of spark or breath (psyche in Greek) that resides in each of us as individuals and also permeates the world, we can achieve peace.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs. But somewhere, some basic principles have to stick. Somewhere there has to be a firm base on which everything else can rest; otherwise, the law becomes the plaything of power, not its master.

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition . . . is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations.