Jews From The United Kingdom

"Still we are not positive that if neither destroyed by enemies nor famine they would increase too much; because for aught we known the fecundity is only great because the destruction is great; instead of the numbers being limited by the destruction, as if nature had said to the camivori, do what you will, you shall not reduce the number of animals, the more you kill the more I will produce. Were the experiment tried on a small scale of letting them be well fed and indulged they might produce prodigiously, but if the experiment extended to their whole races a different result might for aught we know obtain, as we are ignorant of the law by which nature governs the mode of production."

"Y: Do you bear in mind, that in breeding the silkworms, we cause more to come into existence than would otherwise be the case? Z: Though I think we are unauthorized to destroy or prevent life, life does not appear so desirable that we should perform any action for the sole purpose of producing it. Man does not possess sufficient knowledge, to do either act with design."

"First, how do you prove that mankind is invested with the right of killing them, and that brutes have been created for the purpose you assert them to be? Secondly, it is to be observed that the flesh of man himself possesses the same nourishing and palatable qualities? And are we then to become cannibals for that reason?"

"I do not see what right one animal has to deprive another of its small importance, to prevent himself from losing more: if this theory be generally admitted, a young man might kill an old man, to save his own longer expectant life. And are we authorized to kill one animal for the benefit of another of its species? If they should overstock the world, it will then be time to begin to destroy them. It seems however more just that nature should take her course, and that man should be neutral till provoked. It is certainly easier for him to destroy others than to suffer inconvenience himself; but that does not make it right. We have not however at present any reason to complain of the too great fecundity of those animals we use for food, etc., and we even take great pains to produce them, not for their own enjoyment, but for the good and pleasure we derive by destroying and tormenting them."

"The slaying of animals for the most trifling purposes is defended on the ground, that if not done, they would be too numerous, and consequently troublesome to man, and unhappy in themselves; while the promotion of their increase is defended on the assumption, that we are then the authors of much happiness. But let us apply a cautious ear to such reasoning. If the promoting the increase of animals is being the author of increased happiness, destroying them must be positive evil. For our own parts, we prefer neutrality as much as possible on these points, because we know not whether the life of animals generally, abound most with pleasure or pain. We confess that in our view of the question, pain seems to predominate; and the more so the more the numbers of animals are increased; indeed, we neither approve the promoting of the increase of animals, nor of destroying them."

"Does it follow that a person is to withhold the performance of the good which may be within his power, because he does not attempt that which may seem beyond it?"

"Y: Do you include those animals which are guilty of the same crime themselves by living on prey? Should we not then save a thousand lives by killing one? Z: We must never suppose a person or an animal guilty until they are found in the act, and then we must investigate the nature of the crime. It is true that the animal living by slaughter may be less entitled to our consideration than the animal which is harmless; but recollect, the former may plead the same excuse itself, unless his slaughter be only of those animals which live on vegetables; and then, though justice may require their destruction, it would be repugnant to the feelings of humanity to slaughter them with that plea, unless we could quite assure our conscience that our design in killing them was more to prevent their doing mischief than for our own benefit: besides, we might then extend this principle still further, and kill our own species because they are also animals of prey. It is moreover to be observed, that if one carnivorous animal kills another, he may save lives by it also, and the nature of the act will be different according to circumstances [...] And, further, it will frequently be impossible to discover when the animal becomes guilty or innocent, as it depends on such a variety of circumstances: we should therefore be more safe from infringing the laws of moral rectitude, not to interfere in this case."

"Y: I suppose you also deem it a crime to drink, as you destroy myriads of animals in the water of every draught? Z: I consider this an evil, but not a crime, because I do not cause or wish them to be there, and would assist them to escape if possible. They have no more claim to the water than I have; and we know so little of the nature of these animals, that we are not even sure that they die when the water is drunk; the very fact of their being there is concealed from us, and but for the microscope we should never have known it. I however consider it wrong to waste water in anyway which may injure the animalcula."

"The number of animals which can be brought into existence probably being limited, or the number destined to inhabit our globe probably being so; it appearing reasonable to think that no new animals are created by being born, nor destroyed by being killed, but that being born is merely becoming conscious, and death or sleep being only a loss or suspension of consciousness, [...] the identity never being destroyed."

"And though I cannot conceive how any person can shut his eyes to the general state of misery throughout the universe, I still think that it is for a wise purpose; that the evils of life, which could not properly be otherwise, will in the course of time be rectified, and the exquisite pleasures for which we are formed will be enjoyed in our progeny: also that we may ourselves become the inhabitants of the improved world, or of some other world improved in a like manner; and that even if the different species of all the present animals should become extinct, as indicated by what we have observed of the different bones in the several strata, the discoveries of the present time may enrich the future, unless every trace of them should be destroyed at once."

"In order to admire the goodness of God with the greatest force, we should endeavour to reach in imagination the improved state of the world, which it seems probable will be effected in the course of time. What may not be expected from the genius of man, which appears to gain fresh powers from every new idea that he gains from his fellows, and fresh means from all the inventions which the united efforts of the whole species bring forth? It is the extent of combination which chiefly raises man above brutes; and to combination are we to look to mature the views of Providence in forming society, and in regulating the affairs of life. Then will every animal within the reach of man feel the effects of his power, by his increase of happiness instead of his misery, and then only may man boast of his being lord of the creation, for which he will be fitted."

"Are [animals] not furnished with most feelings similar to our own? They indisputably evince in an eminent degree most of the same passions. Things which affect us, generally seem to affect them in the same way; and at least the following sensations and passions are common to both, viz. hunger, desire, emulation, love of liberty, playfulness, fear, shame, anger, and many other affections though they are destitute of the power of laughter. But little occasion have they to exercise such a faculty!"

"Axiom 5. That we should never admit of the propriety of the will or volition of one animal being the agent of another, unless we should perceive its own good to result from it, or that justice should require it."

"It has been generally, but not always, the custom of naturalists to degrade the powers of dumb animals into mere instinct, and not to allow them reason; and on the other hand to elevate the qualities of man, by entirely disavowing the power of instinct in man, giving him the use of reason alone. It appears to me, that there is such a quality as instinct; by which I understand a desire to do any thing without knowing why, or without having the object in view which it is to reach. I am of opinion that both reason and instinct act in man and also in brutes; and I will even grant that the proportion of reason to instinct is greater in man than in other animals; but that the latter possess a great portion of reason would it seems be absurd to dispute."

"Suppose...we reflect on the building of London Bridge, we cannot then help admiring the genius and assiduity of man. But could all the torture and destruction that this has caused to the poor horses, who drew the stones and cleared the rubbish, be brought to light, what an emblem of crime would this beautiful bridge exhibit; many years’ labour has it cost; many teams have been constantly at work, and the extreme severity of the labour imposed on them was almost at any time to be seen. Now, if all the strainings, the lashes, the blows, and the wrenchings with all the bits, had been kept account of, how immense would be the list..."

"[T]his seems to be still the age of infancy, and baby-like do we cry. This is all made for me! The land and the ocean abound with myriads of animated beings of admirable construction only for me to play with, to torment, and to destroy. This is what we are taught."

"Axiom 8. That the importance of any action is measured by the degree of pleasure or pain that it causes or prevents."

"[E]very animal has more right to the use of its own body than others have to use it."

"The force of custom or habits even proverbial; and accordingly we take advantage of the magnified representation in which we have been pleased to paint its effects, to veil our eyes from the sufferings of others, of mankind as well as of brutes; and whatever be their lots, if they suffer from over exertion, from being flogged, from exposure in danger, from want, from cold, from heat, etc., we lull our imagination with the idea that they do not feel those evils: custom we say is second nature."

"[W]e should never admit of the propriety of the will or volition of one animal being the agent of another, unless we should perceive its own good to result from it, or that justice should require it."

"Every animal possesses something which distinguishes it from all other animals; and this is what I understand by personal identity, or rather the identical self. This in every animal is perfectly distinct and indivisible, since the only knowledge we have of it is when it is entire; and divisibility of this is what we cannot conceive: but if indivisible, it must also be indestructible, and must always have existed. It is not possessed of any kind of consciousness: but no consciousness can, it appears, exist without it; as life itself seems to be composed of personal identity, and other essentials of the mind or body, and that it is the combination which produces consciousness."

"Therefore it is plain that no particular thing can be made by a machine at all; neither an atom, or matter, which is the only identity of matter; nor the soul, which is the only identity of a person (and this applies also to every other animal or vegetable, as every thing, if it feels, must, it appears, have an identical self or soul, similar to that of any other being). No feeling can, it appears, be without reference to some self or soul)"

"[H]owever the state of man may be above that of other animals, if the superiority be owing to his being differently situated, we must not dazzle ourselves by gazing on the brilliancy of the situation, but learn how to estimate their true qualities only; though the situation gives the one the powers to act, and denies it to the other."

"Therefore, as a person cannot be in duplicates, it is plain, that the soul cannot be the product of mechanism. And every person knows that his self is only his self, and the same self at all times, without division, augmentation, or change of any kind, he knows it has an identity, and there* fore is not the effect of matter."

"This culture has developed, with those who’ve created it, doing so in the name of today's incarnation of Labour. There’s nothing kinder nor gentler about it."

"Acton, half an hour ago. Popped into a cafe for some baklava with the kids and our Ukrainian friends. People have been brutally murdered, kidnapped and there are people in London dancing."

"Men are not as scared to lose and they’ve got a lot more time to devote to, not exactly pointless things, but to being good at things like Countdown."

"When you tell people that you are studying maths at uni, they are like, “Oh …”. Especially a blonde Essex girl."

"I just passed two cars in West London driving with Palestinian flags flying from each window, bouncing up and down in their cars, seemingly celebrating like they were having a party. Make no mistake, this is a dangerous and terrifying time for all Jews around the world."

"More than other subjects there’s a myth that you have to be an absolute genius to be good at maths and to enjoy it, so I think it’s less accessible for people. Even the word “maths” makes people screw their face up."

"I see the maths face quite a lot. It’s the blind panic that they have to do maths in front of people. It’s just fear and dread. There’s definitely a maths face – try it on someone."

"I’m really interested in male and female brains and whether female brains or male brains are better at maths. You sit men and women down and give them a maths test and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set."

"The year in Oxford was the philosophically most important for Rawls since 1941–42 (his first year as a philosophy student, under the influence of Malcolm). Through Urmson, he got to know Oxford’s most important philosophers. He attended a lecture course by H. L. A. Hart, who, freshly promoted to a professorship, was expounding some of the ideas he would later publish in The Concept of Law. Rawls was especially impressed with a seminar taught by Berlin and Hampshire, with Hart’s active participation, in the winter of 1953. This covered Condorcet, Rousseau’s Social Contract, John Stuart Mill’s "On Liberty," Alexander Herzen, G. E. Moore, and two essays by John Maynard Keynes. Rawls continued to think of this seminar as an exemplar of excellent teaching that he should seek to emulate."

"Ronald Dworkin... argues that our law includes not only norms found in treaties, customs, constitutions, statutes, and cases, but also moral principles that provide the best justification for the norms found there.5 On his account, the things justified by moral."

"Jesus' disclosure shows that in his very nature God is self-effacing, whereas Christian orthodoxy has thought of him as the opposite; majestic, glorious and triumphal."

"Certainly in the gospels Jesus manifested love, but it was very different from what is generally supposed. It included a certain ruthlessness in his care and concern, a willingness to condemn not individuals but classes, a hatred of bigotry and pretence."

"All the synoptic gospels show Jesus in close relationship with the ‘outsiders’ and the unloved. Publicans and sinners, prostitutes and criminals are among his acquaintances and companions. If Jesus were homosexual in nature (and this is the true explanation of his celibate state) then this would be further evidence of God’s self-identification with those who are unacceptable to the upholders of ‘The Establishment’ and social conventions."

"Men usually remain unmarried for three reasons: either because they cannot afford to marry or there are no girls to marry (neither of these factors need have deterred Jesus); or because it is inexpedient for them to marry in the light of their vocation (we have already ruled this out during the ‘hidden years’ of Jesus’ life); or because they are homosexual in nature, in as much as women hold no special attraction for them. The homosexual explanation is one which me must not ignore."

"Though he died in 1946, Keynes still dominated economics at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. It wasn't just that all the leading figures among the faculty, Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson, Brian Reddaway, David Champernowne, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Meade, had been his pupils and/or collaborators. It was the tone of the place. The study of economics, theoretical or empirical, was driven by the desire to improve the conduct of economic policy. This did not mean that pure theory was neglected. Indeed, in those years Robinson was fighting a stirring battle in the realms of high theory with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nor was Cambridge innocent of the cutting edge of econometric technique. Richard Stone, who, following Keynes's suggestions, had created the first modern national income accounts, was still director of the Department of Applied Economics where much of modern econometrics was pioneered."

"In 1977 my wife and I and our two young children spent the first of many summers in the comfortable, rambling house of Nicky and Clarissa Kaldor at 2 Adams Road. Nicky, too, had worked with Keynes as a young man, and he loved discussing (or rather expounding) economics. He was then obsessed by the need to save the world from the evils of 'monetarism', and would develop this theme for many hours at a stretch. I would ask questions, which he probably attributed to ignorance or incompetence or both, but which gave him fresh opportunities to lambast Milton Friedman and other assorted 'neo-classical' economists and free-trader. Nicky suffered from narcolepsy, and would often fall asleep in full flow, only to resume ten or fifteen minutes later at exactly the point he had left off. He was a wonderful and generous teacher and friend, and I learnt a great deal from these tutorials, though I had a strong intuition that he was fighting a losing battle against the forces of darkness."

"Any artist worth his salt thinks music far more than he practices. Practice divides the mind between music and the mechanics of managing hands and feet. Inward hearing has its roots in musical thought."

"I am startled, occasionally, to find “intelligence” used as the antithesis of “feeling”, as though the two played against each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. No intelligent interpretation is lacking in emotional values. What this probably means is that, depending on gifts and degree of maturity, some natures emphasize brain over heart. Where such an imbalance occurs, it must be corrected by conscious and concentrated application to emotional content. If an interpretation is unduly cerebral, liveness and color can be infused into it by attention to whether the theme is now in the right hand, now in the left; whether it is supported by an accompaniment which has significance of its own, or merely hums along."

"The critics are occasionally pleased to compliment a pianist by saying that he plays in the grand style. Exactly what do they mean by that phrase? In the broadest sense, they mean a style of playing which penetrates deeper than the physical conquering of the piano. It concerns itself with the release of music. The “grand style” moved listeners through interpretation."

"Like nearly all of the Leschetizky pupils, he represented the last vestiges of romanticism as it was actually practiced in the romantic period — which means pliancy, a perpetually singing line, concentration on inner voices and a free approach and a free approach to the notes. In Moiseiwitsch's case, freedom was always tempered by impeccable musicality."

"Inflation and Employment in capitalist countries, in my own view, the change is the other way around: the constraints on the pressure of demand tend to be excessive, with the result that unemployment is much greater than can be justified by the needs of resource-allocation, and the rate of economic growth is appreciably less than it could be. The main reason for this is that the distribution of power and, ultimately, the distribution of incomes, changes in favor of labor the faster the economy grows and the nearer it is to full employment, and over a longer period it changes in favor of capital the greater the volume of unemployment. This is the real reason why the continuance of Keynesian policies after the war led to a recrudescence of long-discredited ideas that go by the name of “monetarism.” The main attraction of monetarism was not its intellectual simplicity— inflation is a matter of the money supply, period— but that it elevated the fear of inflation to the unique position which could not be justified by the experience of numerous countries who habitually suffer from it."

"The national predicament has obsessed public debate for five years now; all political discussion has revolved on it. In that time, innumerable unrelated or contradictory explanations for the crisis have been advanced by British economists. The most influential has doubtless been Kaldor’s, which attributes Britain’s post-war economic decline to a shortage of cheap labour from the primary sector, due to the uniquely rationalized English agriculture of the last century."

"The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation — Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive."

"...there is no point to musical analysis at all unless it is 'two-dimensional' – unless [...] one examines the music in terms of what I call its 'Background' (and this 'Background' is the sum total of the expectations which the composer creates) and its 'Foreground' (and its 'Foreground' is what he does instead). That is to say, the composer creates certain expectations, well-defined expectations, which he proceeds to meaningfully contradict. There is therefore a strong relation between 'Background' and 'Foreground', between that which happens and that which lies at its back – or to put it the other way round, between that which the composer leads you to expect, and that which he does instead..."

"Well, there it is. I think you can pass your verdict as well as I can. My verdict is that it is a little bit of a regression to childhood, but after all, why not?"

"My experience from many talks with Hans Keller: always touching the nerves of a subject. Never escaping commitment to an answer. Sharply cutting half truths. Generous and gentle to a reliable friend. Regardful for struggling minds, uncompromising with garrulous talkativeness in words as well as in music. Quick but never in a hurry. Precise timer and flexible thinker. Innovative from a deep source of sensitiveness and fully conscious observations. Untiring worker."