You will not become a saint through other people's sins.

You will not become a saint through other people's sins.

It is nobler to convert souls, than to conquer kingdoms.

It is nobler to convert souls, than to conquer kingdoms.

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go read more

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.

Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in read more

Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of read more

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the read more

...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.

Our knowledge and our ability to handle our problems progress through the open conflict of ideas, through the tests of read more

Our knowledge and our ability to handle our problems progress through the open conflict of ideas, through the tests of phenomenological adequacy, inner consistency, and practical-moral consequences. Reason may err, but it can be moral. If we must err, let it be on the side of our creativity, our freedom, our betterment.

Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex read more

Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.