Quotes from Matthew Stewart

And the civil state is the actual state that results from the attempt to build a bridge from the state of nature to the state of reason. Its aim is to induce naturally rebarbative human beings to behave as if they were reasonable.

In the eyes of some religious conservatives, "the dangerous and sinfull practice of inoculation"1 represented an arrogation of God's unalienable right to deal death to sinners.

In a democracy, says Spinoza, "the welfare of the whole people, not the ruler, is the supreme law

It turns out that maybe breeding bonsai-tree children to become résumé zombies isn't so good for their mental health.

When the safety of a state depends on any man's good faith, and its affairs cannot be administered properly unless its rulers choose to act from good faith, it will be very unstable," Spinoza notes.

Market is not the opposite of regulation or government any more than swim meet is the opposite of swimming pool. Every market needs its rules, these rules necessarily come from outside the market itself, and they aren't always written down.

America's mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is "one nation under God" is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now--and for that we should be grateful." p 426

If individual merit considered in isolation were the source of wealth, then excluding more than half of the population from realizing their potential on account of their sex or skin color would be like sabotaging more than half of all factories or making more than half of all homes uninhabitable.

Of the many attributes that seem to mark America's founders as residents of a foreign time and place, probably none is more astonishing today than their unapologetic confidence in the power of books—and in particular the books of the philosophers. At

Justice does not exist in the abstract," Epicurus flatly asserts; it is just "a compact to not harm or be harmed";

Consider, for example, Jefferson's essay, penned in 1764 at the age of twenty-one, on the question, "Whether Christianity is part of the Common Law?"63 His answer was confident and unequivocal: "We may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.

Philip Livingston, too, alludes to the virtuous atheist in his magazine from the 1750s: "It is an Opinion too generally received, that Man is led into all the Crimes and Extravagancies he commits, thro' Unbelief. And no Wonder this Doctrine, false as it is, should be so vigorously inculcated by Men whose Interest consists in a Depression of rational Faculties."174

The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.208

Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue.

It is certain in theory that the only moral foundation of government is, the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this principle?" he wanted to know. "Women will demand a vote," he intoned with horror, as might "every man who has not a farthing.

Disease and death directly attributable to massive health care policy failure was and remains a far more real danger to American lives than any military enemy.

But pantheism is better understood as the idea that God and Nature are two ways of talking about the same thing, and in this sense it is the core religious sensibility of the Enlightenment, from its beginning with Bruno's rediscovery of Lucretius through Locke's proof of a God to the American Revolution. Spinoza did not invent this movement; he epitomized it.

Most religions assume that you find purpose through some agent that sits above or outside the world and imbues it with purpose.

There were about two years when I literally paid no rent anywhere in the world. Everyone's a contact, but there's no real human interaction. That's a very wearying thing.

At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea into the water.

In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they're helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent.

Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions.

Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.