Philosophy

"The union of clean-shaven supporters of biological racism with bearded supporters of the dictatorship of the proletariat would certainly make for a good hard-core porn script, but it would never make it out of the small red-light circuit of the political underworld."

"A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written."

"But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?"

"The federal government doesn’t officially track the size of extremist groups, because it’s legal to join them. Membership also tends to be fluid, which means it’s hard to gauge whether Biden’s strategy is working. “They’re just much less structured and hierarchical,” said a senior administration official. “They’re better defined as movements. People flow into them, they could dabble in two at the same time, or go in and out.”"

"I don't like radical anything; left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals."

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all."

"It seems to me that it is these extremists who are advocating a soft approach. Their oversimplifications and their baseless generalizations reflect the softness of those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a continuing struggle against a powerful and resourceful enemy. A truly tough approach, in my judgment, is one which accepts the challenge of communism with the courage and determination to meet it with every instrumentality of foreign policy—political and economic as well as military, and with the willingness to see the struggle through as far into the future as may be necessary. Those who seek to meet the challenge—or, in reality, to evade it—by bold adventures abroad and witch hunts at home are the real devotees of softness—the softness of seeking escape from painful realities by resort to illusory panaceas."

"The director of the FBI considers racially motivated domestic extremists such as white supremacists the “top threat” facing Americans, as the nation continues to learn more about such people who perpetrated the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol last month. “The top threat we face from [domestic violent extremists] continues to be those we identify as Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVEs), specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race,” FBI director Christopher Wray testified before members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The FBI has formally elevated the threat from white supremacist groups to its top priority level, alongside Isis and its network of homegrown terrorists, Mr Wray said."

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars."

"If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them."

"There are many taboos, intolerance and extremism. And our task is — to destroy them. I believe that clever and artistic, reasoned and convincing humor can push more and more walls in our world. And it can be done without insult or aggression."

"Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention."

"Any time that you devote airtime to espouse these extreme viewpoints you are lending it legitimacy and normalising it and telling your audience that this is an acceptable viewpoint that deserves to be aired in the public domain. That’s exactly what Fox News has done and they have blood on their hands."

"An individual sitting in front of a computer in one country can communicate with, encourage, and inspire multiple extremist actors thousands of miles away. Social media provides an avenue for the rapid movement of information in a realm where radicalization is often a personal and anonymous process."

"Grace: Vera, remember how I taught your children... Remember how happy you were, when I... When I taught your children about the doctrine of stoicism and they finally understood it? Vera: All right, for that, I'm gonna be lenient. I'm going to break two of your figurines first, and if you can demonstrate your knowledge of the doctrine of stoicism by holding back your tears, I'll stop. Have you got that?"

"Stoics... thought of the ...[as] an extremely tenuous... physical agency spread continuously throughout the organism... capable of producing physical effects... [T]he pneuma theory... provided... explanation for... the tangible ['passive'] forms of matter (solid and liquid) and the intangible ['active'] ones (fiery and aery)... [T]he different forms of pneuma were composed of varying blends of fire and air. ...When the ethereal pneuma held the... body together in a coherent pattern... it entered into a 'total union'... The psyche and the pneuma became interchangeable terms, which referred equally to a pattern of observable characters and to the hypothetical medium presumed to underlie it."

"[H]ighly favorable to the development of a systematic natural science... first and foremost, the Stoics believed in 'determinism'... nothing willful... everything... according to law. The secret of human life was to fathom the general character of this universal order and to live in harmony with it. ...[A]strological divination... was justified by appealing to the harmony and interaction between celestial and terrestrial events. ...Greek atomists implied [that] atoms... by chance, happened to stay interlocked [in human bodies] for... seventy years... [T]he Stoics... preferred to start at... organized systems [having] 'integral properties'... not derived from the... parts. ...'This ...we call the '... a continuous dynamic agency... maintaining... cohesion... As we tighten a drum-head, the sound... rises in pitch. ...Now tension is not an additional ingredient... it is a state... The pneuma... exists in various... states of tension or 'tones'... In some respects... an extension of the Pythagorean theory of musical harmonies. ...Several kinds of pneuma existed... The 'cohesive...' responsible for the unity of a body, and for the fixed pattern of properties... the 'vital...' gave it animation; while... 'rational...' was only present in... thinking beings."

"My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

"Your good fortune is not to need good fortune."

"Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism — all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life."

"There are two ways of coping with fear: one is to diminish the external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. The latter can be reinforced, except where immediate action is necessary, by turning our thoughts away from the cause of fear. The conquest of fear is of very great importance. Fear is in itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces hate of that which is feared, and it leads headlong to excesses of cruelty. Nothing has so beneficent an effect on human beings as security."

"One cannot accept the attitude of some among the Stoics, who said, "What does it matter to me if my family suffer? I can still be virtuous." The Christian principle, "Love your enemies," is good, but the Stoic principle, "Be indifferent to your friends," is bad."

"Spinoza does not, like the Stoics, object to all emotions; he objects only to those that are "passions," i.e., those in which we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces. …Understanding that all things are necessary helps the mind to acquire power over the emotions."

"There is, in fact, an element of sour grapes in Stoicism. We can't be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn't matter being unhappy. This doctrine is heroic, and, in a bad world, useful; but it is neither quite true nor, in a fundamental sense, quite sincere."

"There goes with this a certain coldness in the Stoic conception of virtue. Not only bad passions are condemned, but all passions. The sage does not feel sympathy: when his wife or his children die, he reflects that this event is no obstacle to his own virtue, and therefore he does not suffer deeply. Friendship, so highly prized by Epicurus, is all very well, but it must not be carried to the point where your friend's misfortunes can destroy your holy calm. As for public life, it may be your duty to engage in it, since it gives opportunities for justice, fortitude, and so on; but you must not be actuated by a desire to benefit mankind, since the benefits you can confer — such as peace, or a more adequate supply of food — are no true benefits, and, in any case, nothing matters to you except your own virtue. The Stoic is not virtuous in order to do good, but does good in order to be virtuous. It has not occurred to him to love his neighbour as himself; love, except in a superficial sense, is absent from his conception of virtue."

"To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it. We admire a medical man who risks his life in an epidemic of plague, because we think illness is an evil, and we hope to diminish its frequency. But if illness is no evil, the medical man might as well stay comfortably at home. To the Stoic, his virtue is an end in itself, not something that does good. And when we take a longer view, what is the ultimate outcome? A destruction of the present world by fire, and then a repetition of the whole process. Could anything be more devastatingly futile? There may be progress here and there, for a time, but in the long run there is only recurrence. When we see something unbearably painful, we hope that in time such things will cease to happen; but the Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over and over again. Providence, which sees the whole, must, one would think, ultimately grow weary through despair."

"If virtue is the sole good, there can be no reason against cruelty and injustice, since, as the Stoics are never tired of pointing out, cruelty and injustice afford the sufferer the best opportunities for the exercise of virtue."

"Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts. But the Stoics never took over Plato's doctrine of ideas, and most of them rejected his arguments for immortality. Only the later Stoics followed him in regarding the soul as immaterial; the earlier Stoics agreed with Heraclitus in the view that the soul is composed of material fire."

"Stoicism, unlike the earlier purely Greek philosophies, is emotionally narrow, and in a certain sense fanatical; but it also contains religious elements of which the world felt the need, and which the Greeks seemed unable to supply."

"What was best in the Cynic doctrine passed over into Stoicism, which was an altogether more complete and rounded philosophy."

"Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics. A great many young people lose faith in these dogmas at an age at which despair is easy, and thus have to face a much more intense unhappiness than that which falls to the lot of those who have never had a religious upbringing. Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage. The craving for religious faith being largely an outcome of fear, the advocates of faith tend to think that certain kinds of fear are not to be deprecated. In this, to my mind, they are gravely mistaken. To allow oneself to entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live in the best way. In so far as religion makes its appeal to fear, it is lowering to human dignity."

"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the skeptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasn'ing but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much."

"The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale... a harmonia... Thereby they created the most enchanting symbol of Greek cosmic piety: "harmony," issuing in the inaudible "music of the spheres," [as] the idealizing expression for the same fact of irrefragable order that astrology stresses less optimistically... Stoic philsophy strove to integrate the idea of destiny as propounded by contemporary astrology with the Greek concept of harmony: to the Stoics is the practical aspect of the harmony, i.e., its action as it affects terrestrial conditions and the short-lived beings here. And since the stellar movements are actuated by the cosmic and this logos functions in the world-process as providence (pronoia), it follows that in this wholly monistic system heimarmene itself is pronoia, that is, fate and divine providence are the same. The understanding of and willing consent to this fate... as the reason of the whole distinguishes the wise man, who bears adversity... as the price... for the harmony of the whole. The existence of the whole... is the ultimate and no further questionable, self-justifying end in this teleological scheme: for the sake of the cosmos its constituent parts exist... for the sake of the whole organism. Man... is by no means the highest mode of being, he is not the end of nature, and the cosmos is not for his sake."

"Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements."

"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints."

"Some philosophers, and the ancient Stoics among the rest, derived a topic of consolation under all afflictions, while they taught their pupils that those ills under which they laboured were, in reality, goods to the universe; and that to an enlarged view, which could comprehend the whole system of nature, every event became an object of joy and exultation. But though this topic be specious and sublime, it was soon found in practice weak and ineffectual. You would surely irritate than appease a man lying under the racking pains of the gout by preaching up to him the rectitude of those general laws."

"It is no accident that Stoicism figures so prominently in Foucault’s The Care of the Self. It is, in the most literal sense, a self-centered philosophy. As such, it is at its strongest in addressing the challenges we face alone: anxiety, grief, disappointed ambition, the fear of death. This makes sense given the system’s basic tenets: we should direct our efforts to things within our control, and not things outside them. But it also makes it easy to persuade ourselves that the suffering of others is not our problem but theirs. Conrad Hensley wrestles with this issue when his future tormentor targets another prisoner, one even lower in the jailhouse pecking order. “What was his duty toward this sad, strange, friendless soul, if worse came to worst?” he asks, and falls back uneasily on a chapter of Epictetus headed “That We Ought Not to Spend Our Feelings on Things Beyond Our Power.”"

"Cynicism … is a withdrawal from the world into blank isolation, while Stoicism is the withdrawal into an inner life, which forms to its votaries an object of the highest enthusiasm. Hence the elation, often hyperbolical, which tinges the Stoical austerity; hence the attractiveness of the doctrine and its spread over the world."

"I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me..."

"This gentleman’s stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself."

"With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering."

"'Tis pride, rank pride, and haughtiness of soul: I think the Romans call it Stoicism."

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!"

"荃者所以在魚，得魚而忘荃；蹄者所以在兔，得兔而忘蹄；言者所以在意，得意而忘言。吾安得忘言之人而與之言哉！"

"Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, the suffering would be bearable. With no certainty of meaning, even comfort begins to feel futile."

"Words like virtue, nobility, honor, honesty, generosity, have become almost impossible to use or else they have acquired bastard meanings; language is no longer equipped for legitimately praising a man’s character."

"The most important part of education — to teach the meaning of to know (in the scientific sense)."

"As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply “are” and “happen” but no longer signify anything. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful. The conflict of this requirement of meaningfulness with the empirical realities of the world and its institutions, and with the possibilities of conducting one’s life in the empirical world, are responsible for the intellectual’s characteristic flights from the world."

"In short, the use of metaphor involves both the awareness of duality of sense and the pretense that the two different senses are one."