Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Later the Order contributed to reconstruct the original vertically built medieval bastions of the city into walls slightly at an angle to offer greater resistance against cannon balls."

"...the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after. " - Some things don't change.

"The Order and many conservatives and refugees of the Ancien Régime in Europe looked towards Russia as the protector of the old system, traditions, and conservative values."

"...because of restrictive policies and the conservative power of the Catholic Church, the regions of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were hardly touched by the innovations of North Italian humanism and the liberalisation of trade; intellectually and economically it sank far behind central and north European standards."

Shocked by the scale of the architecture on Malta, I wondered where the money came from. Apparently from the tithes of European peasants and piracy and slavery of Muslims. I

Interesting to discover that San Francisco is still home to the largest Chinese community outside of China, despite the massive expansion of Chinese trade since 1993,

"There is no more evidence for this sort of Utopia than there is for the existence of heaven"

"[Religious toleration] is practicable because, while each man believes that his own religion, or the lack of it, is the truth or nearest to the truth, he looks upon the alternatives as lesser good and not as evil" In the light of his earlier remarks about polygamy and his later remarks about Marcus Aurelius, you have to wonder whether Devlin would tolerate Islam.

"There may be times in the future, as there have been in the past, when a man has to set himself up against society. But if he does so, he must expect to find the law on the side of society." Not necessarily so, see death penalty.

"If the law on abortion causes unnecessary misery, let it be amended, not abolished on the grounds that abortion is not the law's business." Science and technology change the circumstances of human misery, and not just in ways that support liberalism; the advances in neonatal care make a good argument for restricting abortion.

"At the worst it leaves morality as. mobile as the law; and though it may not be easy to change the law, it is far easier than to change a moral belief of a community." e.g. the recent report on the declining popularity of the death penalty.

"Disbelief in the virtue of chastity is not confined to those who from the purest motives would like to help spinsters to lead a fuller life; and through the breach in the walls made by the new moralist there will come pouring a horde which he would loathe and despise". Actually this is much more true of treason than of immorality.

"Shalt think otherwise when thou hast a man of thine own, I warrant you." Busted a gut doing the cod Shakespeare of the Black Knight. Great stuff!

Dorian Gray - has all the campness stopped now?

Surprising development!

Enjoying this, especially Puddleglum, don't understand why I don't remember more if it.

"that authority should be a grant and liberty not a privilege, is, I think the mark of a free society."

"If an educated man is armed only with reason, if he is disdainful of custom and ignores strength of feeling, if he thinks of 'prejudice' and 'intolerance' as words with no connotations that are not disgraceful and is blind to religious conviction, he had better not venture outside his academy..."

"A free society is as much offended by the dictates of an intellectual oligarchy as by those of an autocrat" - yes, but are the dictates of an anti-intellectual majority any better?

"it was only in advanced old age that he was to discover that women are always looking into invisible mirrors."

"What Professor H.L.A.Hart calls rationalist morality, which I take to be the morality embodied in the rational judgement of men who have studied moral questions and pondered long on what the answers ought to be, will be blown aside by a gust of popular morality compounded of all the irrational prejudices and emotions of the man in the street."

"But [Mill's 'On Liberty'] made no impact at all upon the development or administration of the English criminal law. This was doubtless because no practical problems arose."

"I would say the key thing in answering these questions is to stop for a moment and think what the question means, or better still, what else the question means."

"There is no evidence that those who deal best with weird questions always get in, and certainly this book is not offered as a magical short-cut to winning prestigious places or indeed jobs." - but you have to wonder how often it was bought as such :-)

'The mingling of the spiritual and the temporal jurisdictions has been good for neither. The break-up of the coalition need not destroy an alliance in which both parties, following different principles, are working for the same end, the moral good of the community.'

Society has a right therefore to define the status of marriage in accordance with the ideas of the majority and to refuse to confer it upon those who do not comform.'

'- the law has exorcised out of itself the old [sacramental] idea that the wife's personality is merged in that of the husband.'

'The State, as I have said, cannot make marriage or unmake marriage but it can still recognise or refuse to recognise marriage.' - this is only the case if the state recognises marriage as a sacrament, which it ceased to do when it took divorce away from the ecclesiastical courts in 1857.

'Polygamy [sic] or polyandry must result in the degradation of either the man or the woman below the level of dignity which according to western ideas is deemed his or her right.'