“There is danger, and no negligible one, to speak of God even the things that are true.”
Sentences of Sextus
“There is danger, and no negligible one, to speak of God even the things that are true.”
Sentences of Sextus
The Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don't like politics; and I don't make "political gestures," as you call it. I don't even believe in politics. To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it. Politics is like having diabetes. It's a science, a catch-as-catch-can science, which has grown up out of simple animal necessity more than anything else. If I were twice as big as I am, and twice as physically strong, I think I'd be a total anarchist. As it is, since I'm physically a pretty little guy... no, in fact, one reason I left was because I believe it is good for an American writer to get outside his country — outside his continent — and see it from a vantage point outside its pervading emotional climate.
“… she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.”
“I’m aware of the problems,” she said. “‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.”
Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 15 “Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone” (p. 248)
address " What is Science? http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320
“Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one.”
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue — for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.
Address https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1994-12-06-9412050445-story.html to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Budapest opposing the expansion of NATO (6 December 1994)
1990s
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
pg. 32, Italics are Feyerabend's.
Against Method (1975)
Context: My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. In the case that induction (including induction by falsification) this means demonstrating how well the counterinductive procedure can be supported by argument.