1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
Context: We have allowed our civilization to outrun our culture; we have allowed our technology to outdistance our theology and for this reason we find ourselves caught up with many problems. Through our scientific genius we made of the world a neighborhood, but we failed through moral commitment to make of it a brotherhood, and so we’ve ended up with guided missiles and misguided men. And the great challenge is to move out of the mountain of practical materialism and move on to another and higher mountain which recognizes somehow that we must live by and toward the basic ends of life. We must move on to that mountain which says in substance, "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world of means — airplanes, televisions, electric lights — and lose the end: the soul?"
“We must not be enticed by mathematically attractive assumptions into pretending that the contingencies of men's social positions and the asymmetries of their situations somehow even out in the end. Rather we must choose our conception of justice fully recognizing that this is not and cannot be the case.”
Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter III, Section 28, pg. 171
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
John Rawls 63
American political philosopher 1921–2002Related quotes
Existence (1956) p. 39; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part III : Contributions to Therapy, Ch. 6 : To Be and Not to Be, p. 94
Existence (1958)
Context: It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it … Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. … the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not.
Speaking & Features, My African Dream: Faith Rally Address, COP17
Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 15
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 37
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)
"A Call for Prayer – and Action -- Against Violence in America" (2012)
“We must make the fee contingent on results.”
“Did you ever hear of anyone in his right mind dealing with a wizard on any other basis?”
Magic, Inc. (p. 21)
Short fiction, The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein (1999)