Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic
Reason and Rationality (2009)
Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic
Reason and Rationality (2009)
“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist
1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)
Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist
Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 205.
Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist
Source: 1940s, Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946), pp. 38-39
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist
1990s, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1993)
Context: I am also here today as a representative of the millions of people across the globe, the anti-apartheid movement, the governments and organisations that joined with us, not to fight against South Africa as a country or any of its peoples, but to oppose an inhuman system and sue for a speedy end to the apartheid crime against humanity.
These countless human beings, both inside and outside our country, had the nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny and injustice, without seeking selfish gain. They recognised that an injury to one is an injury to all and therefore acted together in defense of justice and a common human decency.
John Gray (1948) British philosopher
An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 81)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
“Organization seemed to be the key.”
Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga
Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
Context: Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and materials to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival — to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory — organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.
Honoré de Balzac book Une fille d'Ève
D'ailleurs, le suicide régnait alors à Paris; ne doit-il pas être le dernier mot des sociétés incrédules?
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 7: Suicide.