We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (th...e actual use of language in concrete situations).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must bear in mind the distinction between fame and honor. A virtuous person is an honorable person, a person who ought to be ho...nored by the community in which he or she lives. But the virtuous person does not seek honor, being secure in his or her own self-respect. Lack of honor does not in any way detract from the efficacy of moral virtue as an indispensable operative means in the pursuit of happiness.... Those totally lacking in virtue may achieve fame as readily as, perhaps even more easily than those who are virtuous. Fame belongs to the great, the outstanding, the exceptional, without regard to virtue or vice. Infamy is fame no less than good repute. The great scoundrel can be as famous as the great hero; there can be famous villains as well as famous saints. Existing in the reputation a person has regardless of his or her accomplishments, fame does not tarnish as honor does when it is unmerited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction between... our present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient's taking the law... into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Historically speaking, the most obvious and most decisive distinction between the American and the French Revolutions was that the... historical inheritance of the American Revolution was "limited monarchy" and that of the French Revolution an absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
to his eyes, Funnyface Or Elephant as yet Mean nothing. His distinction between Me and Us... Is a matter of taste; his seasons are Dry and Wet; He thinks as his mouth does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics th...eory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.... Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is one principal and as it were radical distinction between different minds, in respect of philosophy and the sciences; whic...h is this: that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances. The steady and acute mind can fix its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions: the lofty and discursive mind recognises and puts together the finest and most general resemblances. Both kinds however easily err in excess, by catching the one at gradations, the other at shadows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »