Quotes from Arthur Herman

Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that's the visible world around us. In Socrates's and Plato's terms, it's the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world

Aristotle, we must remember, was a doctor's son.

The military masters of Germany have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and have sought to corrupt the opinion of our people . . . [These persons] seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles."23

His name was Parmenides, and in answer to Heraclitus's claim that everything changes, Parmenides countered by arguing that nothing changes. Far from permanency being an illusion, as Heraclitus claimed, it is change that is the illusion.

In his grand theory of the state published in 1651, titled Leviathan, Hobbes insisted that the transfer of a people's self-sovereignty to a monarch and king did indeed take place but it was a onetime transaction. Once it was complete, there was no going back, ever.

As in the Christian Dark Ages following imperial Rome's collapse, Stavrianos argued, the coming collapse of Western hegemony will release nonwhite peoples from cultural and economic bondage and launch a new era of peace and prosperity.

Using one's eyes and ears and sense of touch to diagnose ailments and complaints, and judge the course of a disease or its cure, was in a sense a family tradition. According to the great Greek doctor Galen,‡ Asclepid families also taught their sons dissection.

We watch the boy grow into a young man and then grow old and die, but it is still the same man.

Hobbes's citizens realize that they must give up their natural liberty in order to protect them from themselves. They are like the alcoholic who hands the key to his liquor cabinet to a friend and says, "No matter what I say, don't give me back the key." He knows that unless someone stops him, he is a danger to himself and others.

Now it was up to Bernard to consolidate his victory not just over Abelard, but over the entire Aristotelian worldview. What had offended Bernard most was how Abelard had tried to use the ancient pagan philosopher to pry open the most delicate divine mysteries.

Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into "loving tumults" and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign;

Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability is in the opponent. —SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

harassment of individual German Americans became commonplace.

From the point of view of Plato—not to mention Socrates—this was a shocking downgrading of reason. But Bernard was only following Plato's hierarchy of knowledge as adopted and adapted by Saint Augustine. Just as reason is superior to opinion (doxa), so Saint Augustine taught that faith is superior to reason because it rests on the highest wisdom of all, the truth of God's revelation.9 Faith of this potent kind is more than belief.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it."33 Was it possible that God would devise such a system of natural laws and put man in the middle of them in order to create a nation of slaves? Locke said no.

Before 1942 was out, the United States was producing more war materiel than all three Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—combined.

Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers. If scholars sometimes joke that David Hume is the "real" author of the Tenth Federalist, it is not just because it lays out Hume's vision of an extended republic managing to govern itself into perpetuity.

Reason steps in after, not before, experience; it sorts our observations into meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and exact as anything in Plato's Forms.

In Avoca, Pennsylvania, an Austrian American was accused of criticizing the Red Cross. A group of vigilantes tied him up, hoisted him thirty feet in the air, and blasted him with water from a fire hose for a full hour.

Locke's natural liberty includes liberty of thought, since reason is another of God's gifts, including our thoughts about religion. This made Locke the first great advocate of religious toleration

Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.

Liberty included an equality before the law, since all men are equal before God; and it included a generosity of spirit and independence of mind that Aristotle had recognized as the hallmark of the virtuous man and which Locke saw would prevent a state of normal liberty from degenerating into a "state of license"—in other words, a perpetual riot.

Aristotle's theory of the mean seems simple-minded; or to quote Bertrand Russell again, common sense pedantically expressed. However, if we change the word mean to proportion, we get closer to what Aristotle must have meant—and large parts of his Ethics as well as his Politics make more sense. The mean represents not so much a literal middle point as striking a balance between conflicting impulses and choices, and seeing our way through to the other side.

wipe out any trace of organized religion or religious belief, before it distracted people with a different kind of salvation, the salvation of God.