Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 16 September 2020

 




Sextus’s [Sextus Empiricus] passage should be compared also with the Buddhist doctrine of the Four Noble Truths. In both cases the genesis of suffering is identified as the habit of discriminating between good and bad, which locks one into anxiety about avoiding what one dislikes and getting what one likes and, once one has got it, anxiety about holding on to it.
Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. 
--R. Buckminster Fuller
[Hannah] Arendt cited President John Adams with approval: “a constitution is a standard, a pillar, and a bond when it is understood, approved and beloved. But without this intelligence and attachment, it might as well be a kite or balloon, flying in the air.”
And from Hannah Arendt's "Understanding & Politics," our feature deep quote source, the following:
Words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become clichés. The extent to which clichés have crept into our everyday language and discussions may well indicate the degree to which we not only have deprived ourselves of the faculty of speech, but are ready to use more effective means of violence than bad books (and only bad books can be good weapons) with which to settle our arguments.
SNG: Shades of Orwell, no?

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