Put simply, conservatives highlight the government's role in promoting individual virtue but downplay the government's responsibil...ity to create a society in which virtue can flourish. Liberals are wary of regulating personal behavior, but would give government a powerful say over the shape of social and economic life. In essence, liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is ...no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught us ... his won...derful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--is ...nothing but dreams and smoke.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their... reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we are told of the inhabitants of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to the tranquility and serenity o...f their climate; I rather attribute it to the tranquility and serenity of their souls, which are free from all passion, thought, or any absorbing and unpleasant labors. Those people spend their lives in an admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without any manner of religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not b...etter to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague i...mage and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »