Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.
“"Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist," said Sebastien Faure. The definition is tempting in its simplicity, but simplicity is the first thing to guard against in writing a history of anarchism. Few doctrines or movements have been so confusedly understood in the public mind, and few have presented in their own variety of approach and action so much excuse for confusion.”
Prologue http://www.ditext.com/woodcock/1.html
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)
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George Woodcock 21
Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anar… 1912–1995Related quotes
“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (pp. 19-20)
Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism
“Truth has been confused. Simplicity refused.”
"Love Strong"
The Poets And The Prophet (2006)
As state president, referring to the ruling National Party House of Assembly, 17 August 1987, as cited in PW Botha in his own words, Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, p. 28
“Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120, as quoted in Socinianism And Arminianism : Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, And Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2005) by Martin Mulsow, Jan Rohls, p. 273.
As quoted in God in the Equation : How Einstein Transformed Religion (2002) by Corey S. Powell, p. 29
Variant: Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940).