When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in... its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur... merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to one ...another. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It follows that man has his actual substantive life in the state, in learning, and so forth, as well as in labor and struggle with... the external world and with himself so that it is only out of his diremption that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself. In the family he has a tranquil intuition of this unity, and there he lives a subjective ethical life on the plane of feeling. Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the family, and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame of mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things an...d cannot be the property either of their parents or others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends--an attainment conditioned in this way by universality--there is formed a s...ystem of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all. On this system, individual happiness, etc. depend, and only in this connected system are they actualized and secured.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For if I should not believe all that is written by Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Gh...ost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; we distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, then what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men only.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Papacy is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof; For so did the Papacy ...start up on a Sudden out of the Ruins of that Heathen Power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For it is not the bare words but the scope of the writer that gives the true light, by which any writing is to be interpreted; and... they that insist upon single texts, without considering the main design, can derive no thing from them clearly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »