Quotes from Arthur Herman

Proper government is not a restraint on our natural liberty, as Hobbes and others thought. It is a net increase, since it provides a framework of security in which we can enjoy our civil liberties in ways not possible in the state of nature. It "is the one great reason of men putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature.

Aristotle believed that the goal of political institutions was man's improvement rather than his perfection. He believed the way to do this was by encouraging each individual to realize his potential, rather than force him to submit to a collective order.

Legends, myths, miracles, and symbols: a far cry from the practical and precise hardheaded world Scotland and the Scots had inhabited since the Act of Union.

the duty of the sovereign to respect that liberty: and when he doesn't, when "he that in a State of Society would take away the Freedom that belongs to those of that Society," and pretends to be our master rather than our servant, then it is he, not us, who is the real rebel against society.

Spartan citizens were not allowed to use money, practice a trade, make a statue, or write a poem.

Abelard's love for Héloïse was actually a form of self-love, even self-obsession. "He is a man who does not know his limitations," Bernard confided to a friend. "Nothing in heaven or on earth is hidden from him, except himself.

His name was Saul. He had come to Athens to deliver a message. A Jew by birth and a Greek by language and culture, Saul of Tarsus was also a Roman citizen. In fact, it is by his Romanized name, Paul, that we know him best. His message would be delivered in the language of ancient philosophy, in Greek, and would shake the ancient world to its foundations.

While Egypt gave the world its astronomy and science, China its art, and Mesopotamia its religion, the sole contribution of Nordic civilization was the factory. "As a system of culture," Du Bois announced, white civilization "runs chiefly to marvelous contrivances for enslaving the many, and enriching the few, and murdering both."42

self-conscious principle: change as reform, rather than revolution.

When we realize, Pufendorf wrote, that our own self-interest dictates that we treat others as ourselves, we are ready to live among our fellow men.

John Locke said that the place to start the study of how men behave was Aristotle.3 With a handful of exceptions, the Enlightenment followed his advice.

Thanks to Plato, Socrates's notion of the individual rational soul would become an integral part of Western thinking for the next two thousand years.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.

Aristotle's bias toward observation and classification also led him to break completely with the concept of Plato's Forms. He did so not only because they seemed too abstract and logically unwieldy,13 but because they missed certain essential features of reality.

Reid's maxim, "I despise philosophy and renounce its guidance; let my soul dwell in common sense.

It was a fate that other, later Communist leaders would know, from Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Kim Il-Sung. Lenin at least had the ruthless honesty to acknowledge the truth about what had happened and what would come next.

Reid once defined common sense as "that degree of judgment which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business." Where no one was clearly in charge, common sense would have to reign. It was the moral of modern democracy, as the exponents of the Scottish school had conceived it, and as Scots in America, at least, had brought it into being.

Beyond the actual words of God, and underneath the literal narrative of law, history, and even geography, Origen could discern timeless truths waiting to be pointed out and explained. This way of reading the Bible, called exegesis, would become standard during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Middle Ages came to interpret just about everything morally, symbolically, or allegorically and sometimes all three.

German critics like Paul de Lagarde said that the individual produced entirely by society's manners lacked depth; Nietzsche called him an emotional cripple.

They relativized man, in the sense that they made who we are dependent to some degree on our experience in a particular time and place, rather than solely on some inborn quality or sense.

American workers in war-related industries in 1942–43 died or were injured in numbers twenty times greater than the American servicemen killed or wounded during those same years.

with lawlessness freedom is inconsistent

How does he learn to take that crucial step? Does he learn it the hard way, that if he is going to get along he has to go along, as Pufendorf suggested? Or is there a simpler, more uplifting way, by which we learn that virtue can be its own reward?

From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland.