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A Quotes

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All A Quotes

“A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing.”

“A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.”

“A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us, then, try what love will do: for if men do once see that we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but love gains; and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.”

“A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it... It is as great presumption to send our passions upon God's errands, as to palliate them with God's name... We are too ready to retailiate, rather than forgive, or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us try then what Love will do: for if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.”

“A good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution—in fact the best example to my knowledge—is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial areas, developed in a way which to the outside looks spontaneous. Though in fact if you look at the roots of it, you discover that it was based on some three generations of experiment and thought and work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the population in this largely pre-industrial—though not totally pre-industrial—society. And that again was, by both human measures and indeed anyone's economic measures, quite successful. That is, production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists, liberals and others wanted to believe, and in fact you can't tell what would have happened. That anarchist revolution was simply destroyed by force, but during the period in which it was alive I think it was a highly successful and, as I say, in many ways a very inspiring testimony to the ability of poor working people to organize and manage their own affairs, extremely successfully, without coercion and control. How relevant the Spanish experience is to an advanced industrial society. one might question in detail.”

“A good example of the archetypal ideas which the archetypes produce are natural numbers or integers. With the aid of the integers the shaping and ordering of our experiences becomes exact. Another example is mathematical group theory. ...important applications of group theory are symmetries which can be found in most different connections both in nature and among the 'artifacts' produced by human beings. Group theory also has important applications in mathematics and mathematical physics. For example, the theory of elementary particles and their interactions can in essential respects be reduced to abstract symmetries. [The Message of the Atoms: Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the Unspeakable]”

“A good exercise session leaves an athlete person gasping for air, sweating, and exhausted, and so is writing and drawing for writers and artists, but the brain is what pants and feels exhaustion. Writing and drawing are a great mental effort that equals tiring physical training. When you write and draw, you need to use all your brain muscles to transfer your ideas into the paper. Concentration, knowledge, experience, creativity, imagination, all unite, trying hard to finish a text or an art piece.”