The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine... for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structur...e his conformity and define his deviancy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments becom...e prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is ... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensiti...ve in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade, as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust. But a mo...dest assertion of one's own opinion, and a complaisant acquiescence in other people's, preserve dignity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »