Merlin’s Owl
Metadata
Highlights
- It’s about the courage to trust one’s own thought and observation, to possess one’s own history, speak in one’s own voice.”to our present circumstance.
- Our techologists bear comparison to the sorcerer’s apprentice, producing continuously improved means toward increasingly ill-defined ends. Unless we look to the humanities to clean up the mess, we stand a better than even chance of killing ourselves with our new toys.
- Humanism is about the passion of thought and the will to understand, about Darwin sailing for the Galapagos or Dostoevski in trouble with the police, about Condorcet dying in a garret and hunted by agents of the guillotine, writing his outline of human progress so that he might hearten mankind by his vision of its possible perfections.
- “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then-to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never dream of regretting.”
- The truth isn’t about the acquisition of doctrine or the assimilation of statistics, not even about the chicanery in Washington or the scandal in Santa Monica. It’s about the courage to trust one’s own thought and observation, to possess one’s own history, speak in one’s own voice.
- he also knew that the study of history is the proof of our kinship with a larger whole and a wider self, with those who have gone before and those who will come after, and that we have nothing else with which to build the future except the wreckage of the past.
- Time destroys all things, but from the ruin of families and empires we preserve what we find useful or beautiful or true, on our way to death we make of what we have found the hope of our immortality.
- most of the political arguments going forward in the world at the present moment are the same ones that enlivened the scaffolds of Renaissance Italy annals of Imperial Rome-the old and bitter quarrel between time past and time future, between the inertia of things as they are and the energy inherent in the hope of things as they might become.
- Few pleasures equal the joy of the mind when it’s being put to constructive and imaginative use, and if not to people like those of you on this lawn, to whom do we turn for a new equation, a new line of economic or political theory, a new lyric and a new song?
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Democracy allies itself with change and proceeds under the assumption that nobody knows enough, that nothing is final, that the old order (whether of men and women or institutions) will be carried off-stage every twenty years. The plurality of democratic voices and forms assumes a ceaseless making and re-making-of laws and customs as well as of fortunes and matinee idols. Democratic government is a purpose held in common, and if it can be understood as a set of temporary coalitions among people of different interests, skills and generations, then everybody has need of everybody else.
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Democratic government is a purpose held in common, and if it can be understood as a set of temporary coalitions among people of different interests, skills and generations, then everybody has need of everybody else.
- They die instead from the fear of thought and the paralysis that accompanies the wish to make time stand still.
- Liberty has ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to think for themselves.
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The future turns out to be something that you make instead of find. It isn’t waiting for your arrival, either with an arrest warrant or a band, nor is it any further away than the next sentence, the next best guess, the next sketch for the painting of a life portrait that might become a masterpiece.