
“The wise men were all fools, what to do?”
"Last to Die"
Song lyrics, Magic (2007)
IV, 38
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV
“The wise men were all fools, what to do?”
"Last to Die"
Song lyrics, Magic (2007)
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XXI, Afterword, p. 312
Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
Attributed from posthumous publications
From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)
Context: The method of Marx and Engels consists precisely in a search for the link which exists between what men think, desire, say and believe for themselves and what they are, what they do. This link always exists. It can be explored in two directions. On the one hand, the historian or the man of action can proceed from ideas to men, from consciousness to being - i. e. towards practical, everyday reality - bringing the two into confrontation and thereby achieving archieving criticism of ideas by action and realities. That is the direction which Marx and Engels nearly always followed in everything they wrote; and it is the direction which critical and constructive method must follow initially if it is to take a demonstrable shape and achieve results.
But it is equally possible to follow this link in another direction, taking real life as the point of departure in an investigation of how the ideas which express it and the forms of consciousness which reflect it emerge. The link, or rather the network of links between the two poles will prove to be complex. It must be unravelled, the thread must be carefully followed. In this way we can arrive at a criticism of life by ideas which in a sense extends and completes the first procedure.
W. M. Torrens Memoirs of William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne (1890), p. 234
Attributed
“We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form.”
1770s, Thoughts on Government (1776)
Context: We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.
Milner on 6 December 1901, on post-war government in South Africa, in correspondence with Joseph Chamberlain, as quoted by C. Headlam in The Milner Papers: South Africa, 1933, Cassell, p. 312