“Ideas do matter and do have consequences.”
Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality (1993)
“Ideas do matter and do have consequences.”
Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author
Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 40
Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man
Context: All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.
Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999) American politician
as quoted in Directing the Film, Ed Sherman, 1976.
“Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.”
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
Albert Marrin (1936) American historian