If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves.
a History Of Western Philosophyby bertrand Russell
The secular power, on the contrary, was in the hands of kings and barons of Teutonic descent, who endeavoured to preserve what they could of the institutions that they had brought out of the forests of Germany. Absolute power was alien to those institutions, and so was what appeared to these vigorous conquerors as a dull and spiritless legality. The king had to share his power with the feudal aristocracy.
Newly powerful nations, with the exception of Spain, showed themselves as capable of great achievement as the Italians had been. From the sixteenth century onward, the history of European thought is dominated by the Reformation. The Reformation was a complex many-sided movement, and owed its success to a variety of causes. In the main, it was a revolt.
Philosophy is no longer the pillar of fire going before a few intrepid seekers after truth: it is rather an ambulance following in the wake of the struggle for existence and picking up the weak and wounded.
existence / philosophy / struggle / truth
To justify any such inference.
It must be admitted, however, that life in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull.
Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy.
answers / painful / philosophy / questions / uncertainty
But how is this to be accomplished? “Cut away everything.” The experience of “ecstasy” (standing outside one’s own body) happened frequently to Plotinus.
It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him.
plato / praise / understand
I wish to understand [Plato], but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.