Thoughts of the Day: Friday 16 October 2020

 

                                                    Patrick (William) Ophuls, guest sage

Would a panel of the wise—Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Socrates—conceivably approve of our current way of life?

--William (Patrick) Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results. Nicolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius,, trans. Christian Detmold, quoted in  Ophuls, William. Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences (p. 140). Kindle Edition.
 

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke,”Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” 1791, quoted in Ophuls, William. Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences (p. 96). Kindle Edition. 

The masses always incline to herd psychology, hence they are easily stampeded; and to mob psychology, hence their witless brutality and hysterical emotionalism. Carl G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull quoted in Ophuls, William. Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences (p. 108). Kindle Edition.

Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, quoting Goethe, quoted in Ophuls, William. Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences (p. 113). Kindle Edition.