Quotes from Catherine Wilson

The higher the coefficient of inequality (Gini coefficient) in a society, the worse things tend to be for those at the bottom.

I have to say that some philosophers such as the late Bernard Williams, and I would include myself in this group, would say that tranquillity is overrated as the goal of life.

We have to gamble, and sometimes lose as George Ainslie argues; this keeps the appetite for life sharp.

The (atomic) soul is mortal, and the best life is the one with the least pain and the most pleasure.

The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.

Moral claims aren't, as a class, truth-value apt or not.

It is impossible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honourably and justly, and impossible to live prudently, honourably and justly without living pleasantly. ~ Epicurus

The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. For if someone has these things and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend even with Zeus for happiness. ~ Epicurus

I ... do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a sensible form. ~ Epicurus

It's not the magic that has to be strong enough, but the person who's wielding it.

This is not to say that there is a clear line of demarcation between the living and the non-living. For the ancients, mould and mildew were not clearly differentiated from rust; from our perspective, prions and viruses are also indeterminate. They can reproduce their kind and they employ resources from their hosts to do so, but they do not have life cycles as plants and animals do.

All qualities, relations, and categories are thus fluctuating and changeable and relative to observers. A day might come when 'slave' has only a historical meaning.

Although there are alternative perceptions, there are no alternative facts.

The justice of nature is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness ... neither to harm one another nor to be harmed … Justice was not a thing in its own right, but [exists] in mutual dealings in whatever places there [is] a pact about neither harming one another nor being harmed. ~ Epicurus

Third, the atoms 'oscillated' within objects when bumped into by their neighbours.

Fourth, they sometimes 'swerved'. The swerve was a deviation from the basic downward path. It occurred frequently enough to cause the entanglement of many atoms; the result was a universe containing objects of a sufficient size to be experienced instead of a universe in which individual imperceptible atoms simply rained down. The atomic swerve, Epicurus thought, could supply the basis for free will, if only by providing a model of spontaneous, unpredictable, undetermined action.

Unlike many later atomists, and unlike his Stoic rivals, Epicurus rejected determinism not only in the physical realm but also in the realm of human agency.

It used to be that nobody would really argue with a woman, because what she thought (unless it was by way of providing helpful comments about one's own work) just didn't matter.

We need grief as a precursor to emotional refreshment, and so consume it vicariously in somewhat titrated but powerful enough form through engagement with the arts.