A Quote by Herbert Spencer
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
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I feel that people who haven't read my books and haven't heard me lecture - who don't in fact know what my work is about - have been very hard on me. There is an expression in Alcoholics Anonymous called "contempt prior to investigation." I feel many people practice contempt prior to investigation.
We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.
There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman.
Now the soul of man is divided into two parts, one of which has a rational principle in itself, and the other, not having a rational principle in itself, is able to obey such a principle. And we call a man in any way good because he has the virtues of these two parts.
The State which we have founded must possess the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, discipline and justice ... Justice is the principle which has in fact been followed throughout, the principle of one man one job, of minding one s own business , in the sense of doing the job for which one is naturally fitted and not interfering with other people.
The whole contains nothing which is not or its advantage; and all natures indeed have this common principle, but the nature of the universe has this principle besides, that it cannot be compelled even by any external cause to generate anything harmful to itself.
The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.
[the virtues] cannot exist without Prudence. A proof of this is that everyone, even at the present day, in defining Virtue, after saying what disposition it is [i.e. moral virtue] and specifying the things with which it is concerned, adds that it is a disposition determined by the right principle; and the right principle is the principle determined by Prudence.
Submitted to the Sec. of War. On principle I dislike an oath which requires a man to swear he has not done wrong. It rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it is enough if the man does no wrong hereafter.
Music is a science which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics.
The negative principle negates. The positive principle creates. The negative principle doubts. The positive principle believes. The negative principle accepts defeat. The positive principle goes for victory.
There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don't do what I say.
The principle of building an economy without foreign monopoly capital has become a principle which, for us, is no longer subject to amendment.
Now let us regard the idea of God from the magic standpoint, according to the four elements, the so-called tetragrammaton, the unspeakable, the supreme: the fiery principle involves the almightiness and the omnipotence, the airy principle owns the wisdom, purity and clarity, from which aspect proceeds the universal lawfulness. Love and eternal life are attributed to the watery principle, and omnipresence, immortality and consequently eternity belong to the earth principle. These four aspects together represent the supreme Godhead.
Man, who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species. What becomes of the surplus of human life to which this principle is competent?
The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.
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