Quotes about proposition

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Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/aug/02/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (2 August 1962).
Later life

Solomon Asch, "Comments on D. T. Campell's Chapter", in The Legacy of Solomon Asch : Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology (1990) edited by Irvin Rock, p. 53.

Speech in 2000, reported in "Sotomayor's jackpot win, court rulings revealed" at MSNBC (5 June 2009).

Source: "Social Behavior as Exchange," 1958, p. 597; Article abstract

Campaign statement in Fresno, California (10 September 1952); earlier incidence of similar comments exist:
If Mr. Hughes will stop lying about me, I will stop telling the truth about him.
William Randolph Hearst, about Charles Evans Hughes, in 1906, as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes
If you will refrain from telling any lies about the Republican Party, I'lll promise not to tell the truth about the Democrats.
Chauncey Depew, as quoted in "If Elected I Promise … "Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1969) by John F. Parker

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 19, The Successful Politician Does Not Drink

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

p, 125
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (c. 250 BC)

Speech to The Lions' Club, Brussels (24 January 1972), from The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 49-50
1970s

"Passages from the life of a philosopher", Appendix, p. 489
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

"Muller Bros. Moving & Storage", pp. 200–201
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

Gottlob Frege (1950 [1884]). The Foundations of Arithmetic. p. 99.

From Omni interview, "The Smartest Man in the World" (1979) or from the book p. 195.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 1

New York Times Magazine (23 May 1971)

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter IX

"The Logic of Common Morality" http://web.archive.org/web/20060616233942/http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/vandun_philosophy_argument.pdf, from E.M. Barth and J.L. Martens, eds., Argumentation Approaches to Theory Formation: Containing the contributions to the Groningen Conference on the Theory of Argumentation, October 1978 (Benjamins, 1982; original from the University of Michigan, digitized Mar 12, 2007. ISBN 9-027-23007-2, 333 pages).

Philo to Cleanthes, Part XII
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

p, 125
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (c. 250 BC)

Booknotes interview (1994)

1860s, First State of the Union Address (1869)

49
Empire

A Short History of Decay (1949)

1780s, Letter to Alexander Hamilton (1788)

2000s, States' Rights and Wrongs (2008)

"Drama at the Opera House," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/eoperahouse.htm San Francisco Magazine (September 2001)
Essays

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

The Independent, 21 July 1989

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 291-292

Source: "Outlines of the Science of Energetics," (1855), p. 121; Second paragraph

Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984)

Source: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter One

"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)
Context: In treating of the practical application of scientific principles, an algebraical formula should only be employed when its shortness and simplicity are such as to render it a clearer expression of a proposition or rule than common language would be, and when there is no difficulty in keeping the thing represented by each symbol constantly before the mind.<!--p. 177

John Church Hamilton, History of the republic of the United States of America: as traced in the writings of Alexander Hamilton and of his cotemporaries, v. 7 p. 790. John Church Hamilton was Alexander Hamilton's son. He gives his source for the first quotation as the Reminiscences of General Morton, but gives no source for the second.
Attributed
Context: It was the tendency to infidelity he saw so rife that led him often to declare in the social circle his estimate of Christian truth. “I have examined carefully,” he said to a friend from his boyhood, “the evidence of the Christian religion; and, if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor.” To another person, he observed, “I have studied it, and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Weight Of Authority
Context: In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power. He who makes use of its results to stifle his own doubts, or to hamper the inquiry of others, is guilty of a sacrilege which centuries shall never be able to blot out. When the labours and questionings of honest and brave men shall have built up the fabric of known truth to a glory which we in this generation can neither hope for nor imagine, in that pure and holy temple he shall have no part nor lot, but his name and his works shall be cast out into the darkness of oblivion for ever.

Source: 1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), p. 259.
Variant: It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest, and its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
As extended upon in Adventures of Ideas (1933), Pt. 4, Ch. 16.
Context: Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Source: Tertium Organum (1912; 1922), Ch. XXI
Context: The logical formula: A is both A and Not-A, corresponds to the mathematical formula: A magnitude can be greater or less than itself.
The absurdity of both these propositions shows that they cannot refer to our world. Of course absurdity, as such, is indeed not an index of the attributes of noumena, but the attributes of noumena will certainly be expressed in what are absurdities to us. To hope to find in the world of causes anything logical from our standpoint is just as useless as to think that the world of things can exist in accordance with the laws of a world of shadows or stereometry according to the laws of planimetry.
To master the fundamental principles of higher logic means to master the fundamentals of the understanding of a space of higher dimensions, or of the world of the wondrous.
In order to approach to a clear understanding of the relations of the multi-dimensional world, we must free ourselves from all the "idols" of our world, as Bacon calls them, i. e., from all obstacles to correct receptivity and reasoning. Then we shall have taken the most important step toward an inner affinity with the world of the wondrous.

"The Magic of Science" in Imperial Oil Review (Spring, 1994) http://sites.utoronto.ca/jpolanyi/public_affairs/public_affairs4f.html.
Context: It is not the laws of physics that make science possible but the unprovable proposition that there exists a grand design underlying the physical world. And not just any old "grand design" but one that is accessible to the limited senses and modest reasoning powers of the species to which we belong. Scientists subscribe with such conviction to this article of faith that they are willing to commit a lifetime to the pursuit of scientific discovery. It is hardly surprising that an activity so magical is also undefinable. Science is what scientists do. And what they do is look around themselves for messages written in the sky, the earth, the oceans and all living things – messages that tell of the unity of creation. These messages have been there – unseen, though at times written in letters miles high – since the dawn of history. But we have just passed through an epoch in which, quite suddenly, scientists seem to have learnt speed reading. Discoveries have been coming at an unprecedented pace. In the wake of such a period it is common to consider that we may be approaching the point where all that is readable in nature will have been read. We should be skeptical of such claims. Success in reading some messages brings with it a temporary blindness to others. We forget that between the words written in black in nature's book there are likely to be messages of equal importance written in white. It is a truism that success in science comes to the individuals who ask the right questions.

2000s, The Logic of the Colorblind Constitution (2004)

On The Algebra of Logic (1885)
Context: Any character or proposition either concerns one subject, two subjects, or a plurality of subjects. For example, one particle has mass, two particles attract one another, a particle revolves about the line joining two others. A fact concerning two subjects is a dual character or relation; but a relation which is a mere combination of two independent facts concerning the two subjects may be called degenerate, just as two lines are called a degenerate conic. In like manner a plural character or conjoint relation is to be called degenerate if it is a mere compound of dual characters.
A sign is in a conjoint relation to the thing denoted and to the mind. If this triple relation is not of a degenerate species, the sign is related to its object only in consequence of a mental association, and depends upon a habit. Such signs are always abstract and general, because habits are general rules to which the organism has become subjected. They are, for the most part, conventional or arbitrary. They include all general words, the main body of speech, and any mode of conveying a judgment. For the sake of brevity I will call them tokens.

Richard Feynman, in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999), Ch. 9. The Smartest Man in the World
Context: My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting, Adkins, et al., Constituting the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia, v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia; Same v. Lyons, 261 U.S. 569–70 (1923).
1920s

Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: It has always been fatal when somebody finds out too much too suddenly. If John Huss had cackled more like a hen, he might have survived Michaelmas, and been esteemed for his eggs. The last fifty years have laid the axe of analysis to the root of every axiom; they are triflers who content themselves with lopping the blossoming twigs of our beliefs, or the boughs of our intellectual instruments. We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.

Preface; Previous Attempts Miss the Point.
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)
Context: The extermination of what the exterminators call inferior races is as old as history. "Stone dead hath no fellow" said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the Irish. "The only good nigger is a dead nigger" say the Americans of the Ku-Klux temperament. "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" said Shylock naively. But we white men, as we absurdly call ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard all differently colored folk as inferior species. Ladies and gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin. The Dominicans, the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God. All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. There is a difference between the shooting at sight of aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign attacks on the French Revolution. The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. But nobody in the French Republic had this feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has had to fly for his life from Germany. It was silly to say that the Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists. The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier's class) and Jews (Einstein's race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to invent it.

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)
Context: What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. This conviction, sir, was the main cause. It is true, sir, that the effect of this conviction was strengthened by a further conviction that such a separation would be the best remedy for the fugitive slave evil, and also the best, if not the only remedy, for the territorial evil. But, doubtless, if it had not been for the first conviction this step would never have been taken. It therefore becomes important to inquire whether this conviction was well founded.

The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (1892)
Context: When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer has usually been that the proposition is a "presupposition " or postulate of scientific reasoning. Well, if that is the best that can be said for it, the belief is doomed. Suppose it be " postulated " : that does not make it true, nor so much as afford the slightest rational motive for yielding it any credence. It is as if a man should come to borrow money, and when asked for his security, should reply he "postulated " the loan. To "postulate" a proposition is no more than to hope it is true. There are, indeed, practical emergencies in which we act upon assumptions of certain propositions as true, because if they are not so, it can make no difference how we act. But all such propositions I take to be hypotheses of individual facts. For it is manifest that no universal principle can in its universality be compromised in a special case or can be requisite for the validity of any ordinary inference.

The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (1892)
Context: When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer has usually been that the proposition is a "presupposition " or postulate of scientific reasoning. Well, if that is the best that can be said for it, the belief is doomed. Suppose it be " postulated " : that does not make it true, nor so much as afford the slightest rational motive for yielding it any credence. It is as if a man should come to borrow money, and when asked for his security, should reply he "postulated " the loan. To "postulate" a proposition is no more than to hope it is true. There are, indeed, practical emergencies in which we act upon assumptions of certain propositions as true, because if they are not so, it can make no difference how we act. But all such propositions I take to be hypotheses of individual facts. For it is manifest that no universal principle can in its universality be compromised in a special case or can be requisite for the validity of any ordinary inference.

Report on Manufactures (1791)
Context: The foregoing suggestions are not designed to inculcate an opinion that manufacturing industry is more productive than that of Agriculture. They are intended rather to shew that the reverse of this proposition is not ascertained; that the general arguments which are brought to establish it are not satisfactory; and consequently that a supposition of the superior productiveness of Tillage ought to be no obstacle to listening to any substantial inducements to the encouragement of manufactures.

"Men Made Out of Words"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

"Men Made Out of Words"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)
Context: Suddenly, and without the least necessity or provocation, the country was startled with a proposition to reopen the slavery agitation in a more aggravated form than ever before. The Kansas-Nebraska bill was introduced by Senator Douglas, Chairman of the Committee on Territories, sustained as a Democratic measure by President Pierce, and adopted by Democratic and Southern Whig votes. The bond of peace agreed to in 1850-51-52, was broken, and broken, too, by the very men who had pledged themselves not again to agitate the slavery question. … After a severe struggle, which threatened the integrity of the Union, Congress finally passed laws settling these questions; and the Government and the people for a time seemed to acquiesce in that compromise as a final settlement of this exciting question; and it is exceedingly to be regretted that mistaken ambition, or the hope of promoting a party triumph, should have tempted any one to raise this question again. But in an evil hour this Pandora's box was again opened by what I conceive to be an unjustifiable attempt to force slavery into Kansas by a repeal of the Missouri compromise, and the floods of evils now swelling and threatening to overthrow the Constitution, and sweep away the foundation of the Government itself, and deluge this land with fraternal blood, may all be traced to this unfortunate act.

"The Future of Democracy" http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/what-i-saw-in-america/19/
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.

1880s, Agnosticism (1889)
Context: Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to agnosticism. That which agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. The justification of the agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of natural or in that of civil history; and in the fact that, so far as these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.

An Appeal to the Young (1880)
Context: More than a century has passed since science laid down sound propositions as to the origins of the universe, but how many have mastered them or possess the really scientific spirit of criticism? A few thousands at the outside, who are lost in the midst of hundreds of millions still steeped in prejudices and superstitions worthy of savages, who are consequently ever ready to serve as puppets for religious impostors.

Language as Conspiracy, p. 277
Everything Is Under Control (1998)
Context: You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.")
Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.

On what became knows as the Peano axioms, in "I fondamenti dell’aritmetica nel Formulario del 1898", in Opere Scelte Vol. III (1959), edited by Ugo Cassina, as quoted in "The Mathematical Philosophy of Giuseppe Peano" by Hubert C. Kennedy, in Philosophy of Science Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 1963)
Context: These primitive propositions … suffice to deduce all the properties of the numbers that we shall meet in the sequel. There is, however, an infinity of systems which satisfy the five primitive propositions. … All systems which satisfy the five primitive propositions are in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. The natural numbers are what one obtains by abstraction from all these systems; in other words, the natural numbers are the system which has all the properties and only those properties listed in the five primitive propositions

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)
Context: Propositions prey upon and are grounded upon one another just like living forms. They support one another as plants and animals do; they are based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than the cash of irrefragable conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh; it is meteoric — suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision to vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails, a system based on faith fails also.

198 U.S. at 76.
1900s, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)

Source: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 20.

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), II
Context: Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.
This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion — to say nothing of the shape of his sentences — are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)
Context: I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason. Wherever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism. … I cannot accept your opinion concerning science and ethics or the determination of aims. What we call science has the sole purpose of determining what is. The determining of what ought to be is unrelated to it and cannot be accomplished methodically. Science can only arrange ethical propositions logically and furnish the means for the realization of ethical aims, but the determination of aims is beyond its scope. At least that is the way I see it.

Letter to his friend Maurice Solovine (1 January 1951) p. 120

Source: A System of Logic (1843), p. 4
Context: [W]e may fancy that we see or feel what we in reality infer. Newton saw the truth of many propositions of geometry without reading the demonstrations, but not, we may be sure, without their flashing through his mind. A truth, or supposed truth, which is really the result of a very rapid inference, may seem to be apprehended intuitively. It has long been agreed by thinkers of the most opposite schools, that this mistake is actually made in so familiar an instance as that of the eyesight. There is nothing of which we appear to ourselves to be more directly conscious, than the distance of an object from us. Yet it has long been ascertained, that what is perceived by the eye, is at most nothing more than a variously coloured surface; that when we fancy we see distance, all we really see is certain variations of apparent size, and degrees of faintness of colour; and that our estimate of the object's distance from us is the result of a comparison (made with so much rapidity that we are unconscious of making it) between the size and colour of the object as they appear at the time, and the size and colour of the same or of similar objects as they appeared when close at hand, or when their degree of remoteness was known by other evidence. The perception of distance by the eye, which seems so like intuition, is thus, in reality, an inference grounded on experience; an inference, too, which we learn to make; and which we make with more and more correctness as our experience increases; though in familiar cases it takes place, so rapidly as to appear exactly on a par with those perceptions of sight which are really intuitive, our perceptions of colour.

Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II
Context: We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples.

Report on the Potsdam Conference (1945)
Context: We know now that the basic proposition of the worth and dignity of man is not a sentimental aspiration or a vain hope or a piece of rhetoric. It is the strongest, most creative force now present in this world.
Now let us use that force and all our resources and all our skills in the great cause of a just and lasting peace!
The Three Great Powers are now more closely than ever bound together in determination to achieve that kind of peace. From Teheran, and the Crimea, from San Francisco and Berlin — we shall continue to march together to a lasting peace and a happy world!

What then must we do? (1886)
Context: This new fraud is just like the old ones: its essence lies in substituting something external for the use of our own reason and conscience and that of our predecessors: in the Church teaching this external thing was revelation, in the scientific teaching it is observation. The trick played by this science is to destroy man's faith in reason and conscience by directing attention to the grossest deviations from the use of human reason and conscience, and having clothed the deception in a scientific theory, to assure them that by acquiring knowledge of external phenomena they will get to know indubitable facts which will reveal to them the law of man's life. And the mental demoralization consists in this, that coming to believe that things which should be decided by conscience and reason are decided by observation, these people lose their consciousness of good and evil and become incapable of understanding the expression and definitions of good and evil that have been formed by the whole preceding life of humanity. All this, in their jargon, is conditional and subjective. It must all be abandoned - they say - the truth cannot be understood by one's reason, for one may err, but there is another path which is infallible and almost mechanical: one must study facts. And facts must be studied on the basis of the scientists' science, that is, on the basis of two unfounded propositions: positivism and evolution which are put forward as indubitable truths. And the reigning science, with not less misleading solemnity than the Church, announces that the solution of all questions of life is only possible by the study of the facts of nature, and especially of organisms. A frivolous crowd of youths mastered by the novelty of this authority, which is as yet not merely not destroyed but not even touched by criticism, throws itself into the study of these facts of natural science as the sole path which, according to the assertions of the prevailing doctrine, can lead to the elucidation of the questions of life. But the further these disciples advance in this study the further and further are they removed not only from the possibility but even from the very thought of solving life's problems, and the more they become accustomed not so much to observe as to take on trust what they are told of the observations of others (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth state of matter,1 &c.), the more and more does the form hide the contents from them; the more and more do they lose consciousness of good and evil and capacity to understand the expressions and definitions of good and evil worked out by the whole preceding life of humanity; the more and more do they adopt the specialized scientific jargon of conventional expressions which have no general human significance; the farther and farther do they wander among the debris of quite unilluminated observations; the more and more do they lose capacity not only to think independently but even to under-stand another man's fresh human thought lying outside their Talmud; and, what is most important, they pass their best years in growing unaccustomed to life, that is, to labour, and grow accustomed to consider their condition justified, while they become physically good-for-nothing parasites. And just like the theologians and the Talmudists they completely castrate their brains and become eunuchs of thought. And just like them, to the degree to which they become stupefied, they acquire a self-confidence which deprives them for ever of the possibility of returning to a simple clear and human way of thinking.

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- The sense of the ineffable, p. 89 -->
Context: Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition, faith is attachment to the meaning beyond the mystery.
Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the world becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God.

Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (30 July 1816), denouncing the doctrine of the Trinity.
1810s
Context: Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 28
Context: This world might be a world in which all things differed, and in which what properties there were were ultimate and had no farther predicates. In such a world there would be as many kinds as there were separate things. We could never subsume a new thing under an old kind; or if we could, no consequences would follow. Or, again, this might be a world in which innumerable things were of a kind, but in which no concrete thing remained of the same kind long, but all objects were in a flux. Here again, though we could subsume and infer, our logic would be of no practical use to us, for the subjects of our propositions would have changed whilst we were talking. In such worlds logical relations would obtain, and be known (doubtless) as they are now, but they would form a merely theoretic scheme and be of no use for the conduct of life. But our world is no such world. It is a very peculiar world, and plays right into logic's hands. Some of the things, at least, which it contains are of the same kind as other things; some of them remain always of the kind of which they once were; and some of the properties of them cohere indissolubly and are always found together. Which things these latter things are we learn by experience in the strict sense of the word, and the results of the experience are embodied in 'empirical propositions.' Whenever such a thing is met with by us now, our sagacity notes it to be of a certain kind; our learning immediately recalls that kind's kind, and then that kind's kind, and so on; so that a moment's thinking may make us aware that the thing is of a kind so remote that we could never have directly perceived the connection. The flight to this last kind over the heads of the intermediaries is the essential feature of the intellectual operation here. Evidently it is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehending serial increase; and, unlike the several propositions themselves which make up the series (and which may all be empirical), it has nothing to do with the time- and space-order in which the things have been experienced.

Space (1912)
Context: Supposing you knew — not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition — that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real — as real to the mind.

Leon M. Lederman, p.103 The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question? (1993) https://books.google.hr/books?id=-v84Bp-LNNIC
Context: The phrase "ahead of his time" is overused. I'm going to use it anyway. I'm not referring to Galileo or Newton. Both were definitely right on time, neither late or early. Gravity, experimentation, measurement, mathematical proofs … all these things were in the air. Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, and Newton were accepted - heralded! - in their own time, because they came up with ideas that scientific community was ready to accept. Not everyone is so fortunate. Roger Jospeh Boscovich … speculated that this classical law must break down altogether at the atomic scale, where the forces of attraction are replaced by an oscillation between attractive and repulsive forces. An amazing thought for a scientist in the eighteenth century. Boscovich also struggled with the old action-at-a-distance problem. Being a geometer more than anything else, he came up with the idea of "fields of force" to explain how forces exert control over objects at a distance. But wait, there's more! Boscovich had this other idea, one that was real crazy for the eighteenth century (or perhaps any century). Matter is composed of invisible, indivisible a-toms, he said. Nothing particularly new there. Leucippus, Democritus, Galileo, Newton, and other would have agreed with him. Here's the good part: Boscovich said these particles had no size; that is, they were geometrical points … a point is just a place; it has no dimensions. And here's Boscovich putting forth the proposition that matter is composed of particles that have no dimensions! We found a particle just a couple of decades ago that fits a description. It's called a quark.

As quoted by Felice Friedson, Iranian Crown Prince: Ahmadinejad's regime is "delicate and fragile" http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=459&page=2, August 12, 2010.
Interviews, 2010

IV. Is the Ideal Feasible?
Why Not Socialism? (2009)

Book V, Ch. 5
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Who were the Shudras? (1946)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 211

From a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, (c. December 1934). Quoted in Rusty Burke, Robert E. Howard: New Deal Heroic Fantasist. The Dark Man 2(1/2) Journal, Spring 2006.
Letters

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 47

Solution Unsatisfactory (p. 67)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

(1964) Fada’ih al-Batiniyya. Edited by Abdurahman Badawi. Kuwait: Muasassa Dar al-Kutub al-Thiqafa, p. 82.

This proposition is infinitely important; only, negation as such is formless abstraction. However, speculative philosophy must not be charged with making negation or nothing an ultimate: negation is as little an ultimate for philosophy as reality is for it truth. Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. According to Spinoza's definition, of which more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, 1812
G - L, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 47
The Vocation of Man (1800), Knowledge

The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus on the First Book of Euclid's Elements Vol. 2 (1789)

Colonel Welsh, in "The Monarch musician"
About Swathi Thirunal

Rather than behaving anti-didactically, one should recognise that the learner is entitled to recapitulate in a fashion of mankind. Not in the trivial matter of an abridged version, but equally we cannot require the new generation to start at the point where their predecessors left off.
Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. ix

Letter to L. C. Dunsterville, September 1916. Quoted in Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling. London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978 (p.271).

As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote,they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being.
Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)

Source: Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1965/nov/23/schedule-acts-continued-till-end-of#column_365 in the House of Commons (23 November 1965)

Source: Response to Hartshorne in 'Rorty and Pragmatism, The Philosopher Responds to his Critics', p. 33

What Is A Thing? (1935, 1968)

Laurence Tribe on To End a Presidency (2018)
Source: 13:54 https://www.c-span.org/video/?446316-3/washington-journal-laurence-tribe-discusses-presidential-impeachment&start=834

Speech to the City Conservative Forum in London (12 November 1975), quoted in The Times (13 November 1975), p. 4
1970s