“The mechanical conception of the universe is nothing but naïve realism.”

R. H. Dalitz and F. J. Duarte, John Clive Ward, Physics Today 53, 99-100 (2000).

The Cosmic Philosophy, 1931

Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 129 (1972 edition)

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.

Arithmetica Universalis (1707), p.251

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 4.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival.

Source: Conceptual Structures, 1984, p. 76 as cited in: Jacques Demongeot (1988) Artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. p. 179

Source: Dune

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 102.