Quoted in “Collected works of Periyar E.V.R.” p. 50.
Rationalism
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“Expectations are like hidden rocks in your path—all they do is trip you up.”
Source: The Palace of Illusions
“You cannot tell a man he has the power to make the earth shake, then expect him to walk small.”
Mazrim Taim
(15 October 1994)
Utopia and Violence (1947)
Context: There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
“A man may well bring a horse to the water,
But he cannot make him drinke without he will.”
Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: A man may well bring a horse to the water,
But he cannot make him drinke without he will.
Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 28 (p. 441)
"History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction," Clio and the Doctors (1974)
Context: History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction.
Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 10, The Price Is Not Right, p. 234
