There is a lot of difference between tempting and leading into error. God tempts but does not lead into error. To tempt is to prov...ide opportunities for us to do certain things if we do not love God, but putting us under no necessity to do so. To lead into error is to compel a man necessarily to conclude and follow a falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the consequence of this institution that not a school- house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam, hath been set up,... or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider, at leisure, the wisdom and error of their judgments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real grounds of difference upon important political questions no longer correspond with party lines.... Politics is no longer ...the topic of this country. Its important questions are settled... Great minds hereafter are to be employed on other matters.... Government no longer has its ancient importance.... The people's progress, progress of every sort, no longer depends on government. But enough of politics. Henceforth I am out more than ever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, no...t the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As... members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a very common error of some unscrupulously infidel-minded, selfish, unprincipled, or downright knavish men, to suppose that ...believing men, or benevolent-hearted men, or good men, do not know enough to be unscrupulously selfish, do not know enough to be unscrupulous knaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted.... But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent hist...ory of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of "Munich" may exceed the original error of 1938.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essen...tial and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »