Originally posted by ivanhoeconverse...
"When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are."
R. H. Grant
When you fire people who are smarter than you, you prove you know nothing.
SVW... again.
<edit> or is it "obverse"... hmmmm.. internal debate is good for the soul. "adverse"?.... hmmmm....
"I have been maintaining that the meaning of the word ‘ought’ and other moral words is such that a person who uses them commits himself thereby to a universal rule. This is the thesis of universalizability."
Richard M. Hare (b. 1919), British philosopher. Freedom and Reason, p. 30, Oxford University Press (1963).
"Every country we conquer feeds us. And these are just a few of the good things we’ll have when this war is over.... Slaves working for us everywhere while we sit back with a fork in our hands and a whip on our knees."
Curtis Siodmak (1902–1988), German screenwriter, and Edwin L. Marin. Oberst Karl Heiser (J. Edward Bromberg), Invisible Agent (1942).
As he is unpacking supper at Maria’s. Heiser is an SS man, and supper consists of expensive food items, each one from a conquered country suggested by “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells; Curtis Siodmak [sic]...
What the hell, here's some more from the great Douglas Adams:
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. "
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. "
“The fact that I think Bach was mistaken [with regards to religion] doesn’t alter the fact that I think the B minor Mass is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to tears to hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”
“The fact that I think Bach was mistaken [with regards to religion] doesn’t alter the fact that I think the B minor Mass is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to tears to hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”
When I read this I had to think about Wallace Stevens, a great american poet. He struggled his whole life with the grand questions of life. He also wrestled with religion for all the reasons also expressed here on RHP. I've always admired Stevens for his poetry. I admired him from the first time I heard of him many years ago in my "pagan" period. A time after that I became a Roman Catholic out of conviction. A short while ago it came to my attention that Stevens also converted to Roman Catholicism. I didn't know that ..... on his deathbed ... it was a big surprise to me and very moving ...
The following gem is from an address given in 1928 by Dr. Haven Emerson, Columbia University:
Youth is not a time of life. It is a state of mind. It is not a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the motions. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 50 more than in a youth of 20. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair - these are the long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage and power from the earth, from man and from the infinite, so long are you young. When the wires are all down and all the central place of your heart is covered with the snow of pessisism and the ice of cynicism, then you are grown old indeed and may God have mercy on your soul.
in friendship,
prad
"Our argument ... will result, not upon logic by itself—though without logic we should never have got to this point—but upon the fortunate contingent fact that people who would take this logically possible view, after they had really imagined themselves in the other man’s position, are extremely rare."
Richard M. Hare (b. 1919), British philosopher. Freedom and Reason, p. 171, Oxford University Press (1963).
In his State of the Union address in 1905, Roosevelt stated:
"There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality. All else is immorality. There is only true Christian ethics over against which stands the whole of paganism. If we are to fulfill our great destiny as a people, then we must return to the old morality, the sole morality. ... All these blatant sham reformers, in the name of a new morality, preach the old vice of self-indulgence which rotted out first the moral fiber and then even the external greatness of Greece and Rome."