Quotes from Arthur Herman

the Bolsheviks, less than 25 percent.

Mailer's Negro lived in a realm of Nietzschean nihilism, of Being-for-Itself.

But months, and not a few lives, were lost because the Army insisted on pushing ahead on its own design without once asking if the professional experts might do it better. It would take some time before American companies learned to challenge the War Department on how to design and build the weapons it wanted

Still, the 1745 revolt left behind a sobering question for the Enlightenment to ponder. Why do some societies like England and France and cities like Edinburgh become polite and commercial, while so many others do not—even when they are right next door? Unlocking that mystery became the next great goal for the Enlightenment, and the Scottish Enlightenment in particular.

We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men's Understanding.

Descartes's worldview makes us spiders at the center of an enormous web not of our making. Or in his other famous formulation, we are the ghosts in the machine: souls in a world machine that operates inexorably and impersonally according to the laws of geometry and mechanics, while we operate the levers and spin the dials.

When Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill first met at Tehran in 1943, and Stalin raised his glass in a toast "to American production, without which this war would have been lost," it was a stunning tribute from the leader of world Communism to the forces of American capitalism.

Aristotle's Politics, like his Metaphysics, turns Plato's system upside down.

In every society," Kames concluded, "the advances of government toward perfection are strictly proportioned to the advance of society" toward mutual cooperation and improvement. The better we all get along, in other words, the more benign our rulers can afford to be.

Scottish Whigs had helped to defeat Jacobitism in order to give birth to a new enlightened Scotland. They got their wish— with a vengeance. The years after 1745 witnessed an explosion of cultural and economic activity all across Scotland, as if the collapse of the Jacobite and Highland threat had released a tremendous pent-up store of national energy. It was economic "takeoff" in the full modern sense.

Wilson focused his energies and hopes on his role as possible mediator.

For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

On one side, interaction with others sharpens our minds and deepens our understanding. But it also teaches us about our obligations toward others—

If Aristotle had been right and it was man's destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?

Aristotle's philosopher is always an observer of reality, not the creator of it. Instead of laying out the perfect blueprint, then turning reluctantly to the real world, Aristotle starts with the real world itself.

The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the "Scottish school," as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.

Du Bois brought back a phrase he had coined in 1922, "Africa for Africans": "Hereafter it will no longer be ruled by might nor by power, by invading armies nor police, but by the spirit of all its gods and the wisdom of its prophets."76

America must be "neutral in fact as well as in name . . . impartial in thought as well as action.

Seneca's solution to life's inevitable cruelties was to withdraw. It was an increasingly attractive reaction in the later imperial age. The wise man must shun unnecessary human contact and connections, Seneca said. He must live within, and for, himself. He must cultivate the virtue of apatheia, literally an indifference to the fate of others—apathy even, in the last moment, to his own fate (faced by unjust accusations by the emperor Nero, Seneca and his wife chose suicide).

Where do we find love and comfort in this comfortless, mechanical world? And above all, More wanted to know, where is God? Descartes's answer was confident and pat. God was the omnipotent Legislator who has made everything and installed all the necessary rules that govern the universe, including the laws of mathematics, rather the way the manufacturer installs software on a new Android. Then God steps aside and lets His creation "do its thing.

We decide that what helps and pleases a person we love is good, because it also gives us pleasure. What injures him is bad, because it causes us pain to see him unhappy. We begin to realize that the happiness of others is also our happiness.

Neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs made any protest at this clearly repressive political action—

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong

Faster time meant lower costs, of course, and quicker return on investors' money.