In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.).By “normal” conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish.
There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism. And the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values that the Enlightenment has begun to discover. No doubt the extraterrestrials’ morality is different from ours; but that will not be because it resembles that of the conquistadors. Nor would we be in serious danger of culture shock from contact with an advanced civilization: it will know how to educate its own children (or AIs), so it will know how to educate us – and, in particular, to teach us how to use its computers.
One of the paradoxes of our age is that politicians have never stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good...and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people.
Sometimes when you hit certain [military] ranks...you're thinking about where you're going to go after that and what boards you're going to sit on and actions you can take today to set you up for the future. That's a real thing.
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices.
Capitalism...holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote... the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.
Please be yourself. Don't let other people tell you what your values have to be...We have this amazing ability to think for ourselves, and too few people use that ability.
Half of humans around the world think that climate change could make humans go extinct. There's zero science to support that. There's not even very much science fiction to support that.
We do not think that tragedy is our natural state. We do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it, and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering, that we consider unnatural. It is not success but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.
There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters . . . .
Its consequence is the inability to believe in the power or the triumph of evil. No matter what corruption one observes in one’s immediate background, one is unable to accept it as normal, permanent or metaphysically right. One feels: “This injustice (or terror or falsehood or frustration or pain or agony) is the exception in life, not the rule.” One feels certain that somewhere on earth—even if not anywhere in one’s surroundings or within one’s reach—a proper, human way of life is possible to human beings, and justice matters.
I knew enough, in my college days, to know that it was useless to attempt political protests in Soviet Russia. But that knowledge broke down, involuntarily, many times; so I would probably have been one of those protesters in the street who engaged in the terrible futility of debating with the secret police. I know how they felt and what would make them do it.
Parents need to realize that the powers-that-be don't want kids to get an education. They want kids to be indoctrinated and serve the state, and push us towards towards communism. That's their goal.
