Kindle Notes & Highlights
Fascism, wrote Mussolini, also repudiates and combats the whole ideology of democratic politics. It denies that the majority, merely because it is the majority, can direct human society. It affirms the immutable, beneficial and fruitful inequality of mankind, and denies the myths of happiness and progress.
The term ‘feminism’ was coined in French (féminisme) by the socialist Charles Fourier, and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) gives it one of its best early statements; the book begins with the words, ‘The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able . . . that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege
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If ‘First World’ women who have the means and the knowledge to help their sisters in these disadvantaged circumstances would strain every sinew to do so, the prospects not just for the women themselves but for the world as a whole would be transformed. The feminist challenge should surely place this struggle at its centre.
Give any government, any security service, any policing authority, any special interest group such as a religious organization or a political party, any prude or moralizer, any zealot of any kind, the power to shut someone else up, and they will leap at it. Hence the absolute need for stating that any restraint of free speech can only be specific, strictly limited, case-by-case, powerfully justified, one-off, utterly compelling, in this particular situation alone.
What about the things we do not yet even know we do not know?
History is one of the indispensable studies. No person can be educated or civilized who does not make a study of history, and a habit of reading history. This is because it stands alongside literature and the arts as one of the richest and best sources of understanding human experience and the human condition, and it equips us to understand ourselves, to organize our lives and societies, and to meet the future as best we may.
It is scepticism about logic which keeps nonsense in existence - nonsense dressed in robes, given a seat at government tables, awarded power over the minds not just of the ignorant and illiterate but of children who grow up to be adults unable to shake off the unreasoned and illogical fears, hopes and beliefs that had been injected into them in early life.
the vocation of critic is one of the most comfortable and enjoyable of all vocations, providing one is never challenged to administer the opposite of what one impugns.
In his Leviathan Hobbes argued that people join together in political communities in order to escape the harsh condition of the state of nature, the free-for-all war of all on all in which life is nasty, brutish and short. The mutual contract into which people enter to escape this condition involves giving up part of their original liberty to secure the goods of mutual protection and order, made possible by their submitting to the authority of a sovereign power.
it is precisely because there are things we wish to keep veiled that we wish to peep behind others’ veils - to find out whether we are normal, and safe, and whether we are coping or falling short.
Quantum theory has equally profound implications for an understanding of reality itself. It states in effect that what happens in the microscopic world is the result of measurement - that is, a quantum state does not have a definite character until it is measured (for example, a particle does not have a definite path until the path is calculated). This is because prior to the measurement being made, the quantum situation consists of a range of possibilities - it is indeterminate - and the measurement settles which of the possibilities counts as actual. This raises a vexing question: must there
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What an unhappy conjunction in human history has been the rise of ideas of nationalism with the rapid sophistication and destructiveness of weapons of war.
