Quotes from Matthew Stewart

Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.

For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.

In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on.

What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree.

I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans. I spent one particularly haunting year advising bankers in Mexico.

In business, experience is the big teacher.

Couldn't everyone see that the point of merit is to hold power accountable, not to supply yet another excuse for unaccountable power?

If wealth were the creation of individuals alone - even if it were the result of their ability to cheat and steal from one another - it would fall to earth in the shape of a bell curve. It would not land in the form of an insane ski slope.

The human beings I know are mostly wonderful people, but they often fail to distinguish clearly between what they worked for and the good things that came their way. They also are not so good at seeing the difference between the character flaws of other people and bad things that happen to them.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be," he explained.86

When the revolutionaries of the early modern world peered through their telescopes into the night sky, the first thing they saw was injustice on earth.

The history of ideas matters because ideas make actors out of human beings, and they make actors out of us precisely insofar as they occupy this open, uncontrollable, and inherently unlimited universe of explanations, not the stultifying dogma of a supposed conceptual scheme, not the inert, always epiphenomenal utterances we call doctrines or first principles.

Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.

He had been studying the writings of some local alchemists, he said, but remained baffled by their bizarre symbols and opaque texts. So, he composed a parody of their efforts, making incomprehensible claims by means of unintelligible symbols, and forwarded it to the president of the society. The president, apparently understanding the paper not at all, drew the obvious conclusion that its author was a genius.

Things are for a person "to enjoy," says Locke. "As much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils; so much he may by his labour fix a Property in. Whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others."136

The task of the 9.9 percent is to lubricate the machinery that administers the pain—and then to suggest by example that the 90 percent have a shot at the joining them in a life of ease, if only they would work just a little harder.

Small clients, by contrast, are intellectually challenging, enjoyable to work for, and miserably unprofitable.

Notwithstanding the many variations and exceptions that prove the rule, the common experience of human beings naturally gives rise to a certain shared set of ideas about what we are, how the world works, and how we ought to organize our moral and political existence, or so I will argue. This common consciousness is useful in a limited way for the purpose of making it through the everyday struggles of lives that, in the scheme of things, are not very long or broad.

The Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom ranked for Jefferson as one of the three achievements worthy of gracing his tombstone (the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia were the other two).

By "radical" I mean something more than that they aimed to change the order of society in a fundamental way or that they searched for the deepest roots of problems. The opposite of radical is not "moderate" or "conservative" but "common.

The unity on the right is in fact prima facie evidence of its duplicity.

Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the Nature of man alone consider'd."67 Conversely, "nothing is so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue."68

In the mind there is no absolute faculty of willing and not willing, but only of particular volitions, namely, this or that affirmation, or this or that negation."50 We do suspend our belief in some ideas, in a manner of speaking, Spinoza allows. But what this really means is that we affirm some other idea—namely, that the first idea is uncertain.

The mark of a well-constituted state is that it makes it possible "to avoid the follies of appetite and to keep men within the bounds of reason, as far as possible, that they may live in peace and harmony.