Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17
Context: Fifth Theory.—This is our theory, or that of our Law.... The theory of man's perfectly free will is one of the fundamental principles of the Law of our teacher Moses, and of those who follow the Law. According to this principle man does what is in his power to do, by his nature, his choice, and his will; and his action is not due to any faculty created for the purpose. All species of irrational animals likewise move by their own free will. This is the Will of God; that is to say, it is due to the eternal divine will that all living beings should move freely, and that man should have the power to act according to his will or choice within the limits of his capacity.
“I am fundamentally a dead man: one fundamentally a Peel–Cobden man.”
Letter to James Bryce (5 December 1896), quoted in Andrew Marrison (ed.), Free Trade and its Reception 1815-1960: Freedom and Trade: Volume One (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 209.
1890s
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William Ewart Gladstone 121
British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United… 1809–1898Related quotes
“I think for the first time we can attack the fundamental biology of man.”
[233. The exciting future of biology, Sydney Brenner, Web of Stories, https://www.webofstories.com/play/sydney.brenner/233]
“Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.”
As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
“I thank you doctor, but I am a dead man.”
To a doctor treating his wound. Quoted in John Whitcomb, Claire Whitcomb "Real Life at the White House", Routledge, 2002, p. 177
1880s
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.
Speech to the Labour Party conference on Britain's membership of the EEC (26 April 1975), quoted in The Times (28 April 1975), p. 4
Prime Minister