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.
You May Also Like / View all maxioms
We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important read more
We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it read more
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. - Strong Opinions.
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be...The nation and the read more
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be...The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own read more
It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image. Rather does he create Him in the image of his cravings and dreams- in the image of what man wants to be. God making could be part of the process by which a society realizes its aspirations: it first embodies them in the conception of a particular God, and then proceeds to imitate that God. The confidence requisite for attempting the unprecedented is most effectively generated by the fiction that in realizing the new we are imitating rather than originating. Our preoccupation with heaven can be part of an effort to find precedents for the unprecedented.
My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.
My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.
The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, read more
The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less read more
It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.
