-
Paraphrasing Octavio Paz from The
Labyrinth of Solitude.
-
Miriam Beard.
-
Previous two sentences from
How
to Raise a Good Liberal by Lee Siegel, The Atlantic Monthly, Jan 1996.
-
George Orwell attempts an answer to
this question in his remarkable essay, Politics vs. Literature: An
examination of Gulliver's travels.
-
Quote stolen from Carlos Fuentes.
-
Sentence adapted from a quote by Harold Rosenberg.
-
Sentence adapted from a sentence in Foe by JM
Coetzee.
-
Saint Augustine in The City of
God.
-
According
to Sandeepan Banerjee.
-
As an
introduction to anti-pessimism, read the excellent chapter Herzen vs. Schopenhauer in Aileen M. Kelly's book,
Views from the
Other Shore, 1999. The Russian philosopher Herzen (1812-70)
persuasively ripped through Schopenhauer's conclusions and recipes but
didn't spare the 'unscrupulous optimism' of Hegel either. Herzen's thought
later influenced Isaiah Berlin.
-
According to Pascal.
-
Czeslaw Milosz in the NY Review of
Books, On the Discreet Charm of Nihilism, November 19, 1998.
-
According to Seneca, 3 BCE – 65 CE.
-
According to
Nadine Gordimer.
-
According to
Michel Foucault.
-
According to Isaiah Berlin. Read
excerpt from
his essay on pluralism,
On the
Pursuit of the Ideal.
-
Oakeshott, Michael, ‘The Tower of
Babel’ (1948), in Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962: Methuen),
e.g. p. [Liberty Fund edition 476].
-
From a 1996
review by Bill Totten of The Industrial Revolution by Arnold
Toynbee (written
in the 1880s), an uncle to the historian Arnold J.
Toynbee.
-
Economist
Lester Thurow in The Future of Capitalism.
-
Mark Lilla in
his review of Stuart
Hampshire's Justice is Conflict in the May 11, 2000, NY Review of
Books.
-
Slaves once had
no equality of the right to life. Quote from
Human Rights: The Midlife Crisis by
Michael Ignatieff, May 20, 1999, NY Review of Books.
-
Ortega y Gassett in The Revolt of
the Masses.
-
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
in
On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth.
-
Can Science Explain Everything?
Anything? by Steven Weinberg, Mar 31, 2001, NY Review of Books.
-
Schopenhauer advocated compassion and
renunciation, Nietzsche the exact opposite, Herzen avoided all systemic
advocacy. Which is objectively better? Such plurality of 'rational'
conclusions is intrinsic to the human condition.
-
According to Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
-
According to Franz Kafka.
Footnotes
