Socrates Says

Friday Filosophy v.04.01.2022

April 3, 2022/in Filosophy/by Caroline Slee-Poulos

Friday Filosophy v.04.01.2022

Alan Alexander Milne (18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956) was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both World Wars, joining the British Army in World War I, and as a captain of the British Home Guard in World War II.[1]

He was the father of bookseller Christopher Robin Milne, upon whom the character Christopher Robin is based.

I thought he would be an appropriate choice for April 1st.

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.
Bores can be divided into two classes; those who have their own particular subject, and those who do not need a subject.
I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.
Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.
It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words, like ‘What about lunch?’
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.
You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.
Never forget me, because if I thought you would, I’d never leave.

The Time is Now

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.

For our course lists, please click here.

TESTIMONIALS

Friday Filosophy v.03.03.2023

Friday Filosophy v.03.03.2023 offers quotes and words of wisdom from Robin Williams.

Robin McLaurin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014) was an American actor and comedian. Known for his improvisational skills[ and the wide variety of characters he created on the spur of the moment and portrayed on film, in dramas and comedies alike, he is regarded as one of the greatest comedians of all time. He received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and five Grammy Awards.

Williams began performing stand-up comedy in San Francisco and Los Angeles during the mid-1970s releasing several comedy albums including Reality ... What a Concept in 1980. and He rose to fame playing the alien Mork in the ABC sitcom Mork & Mindy (1978–1982). He made his first leading film role in Popeye (1980). Williams went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting (1997). His other Oscar-nominated roles were for Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), and The Fisher King (1991).

Williams also starred in the critically acclaimed dramas The World According to Garp (1982), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Awakenings (1990), Patch Adams (1998), One Hour Photo (2002), and World's Greatest Dad (2009). He also starred in box office family films such as Hook (1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Jumanji (1995), Jack (1996), Flubber (1997), and the Night at the Museum trilogy (2006–2014). He lent his voice to the animated films Aladdin (1992), Robots (2005), Happy Feet (2006), and its 2011 sequel.

After suffering for many years from depression, paranoia, memory loss and insomnia, Williams died by suicide at his home in Paradise Cay, California on August 11, 2014. He was 63 years old. His autopsy revealed that undiagnosed and severe Lewy body disease had spread widely in his brain. His illness and death sparked debate over the conflation of psychology with neurology.

I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.

Spring is nature's way of saying, 'Let's party!'

No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.

People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House.

Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.

If it's the Psychic Network why do they need a phone number?

The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and yelling, 'You want a piece of me?'

We've had cloning in the South for years. It's called cousins.

Divorce is expensive. I used to joke they were going to call it 'all the money,' but they changed it to 'alimony.' It's ripping your heart out through your wallet.

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you.

Never pick a fight with an ugly person, they've got nothing to lose.

Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.

What's right is what's left if you do everything else wrong.

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.

Cricket is basically baseball on valium.

I loved school, maybe too much, really. I was summa cum laude in high school. I was driven that way.

I have a difficult time doing an Irish accent; even now, it kind of fades slowly into Scottish.

When I went home from Juilliard, I couldn't find acting work.

You can start any 'Monty Python' routine and people finish it for you. Everyone knows it like shorthand.

A woman would never make a nuclear bomb. They would never make a weapon that kills - no, no. They'd make a weapon that makes you feel bad for a while.

The Time is Now

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.

For our course lists, please click here.

March 3, 2023

Friday Filosophy v.05.27.2022

Friedrich August von Hayek, CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher. He became known because he strongly defended liberalism and free-market capitalism. He was against too much central control of the economy and society. He thought that forms of government like socialism were not good for the economy, and damaged freedom of the individual. Hayek's signature work, The Road to Serfdom, refers to the consequences of socialism.

He was one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the 20th century. He was one of the most important members of the Austrian School of economics. He also had many ideas in the fields of jurisprudence and cognitive science. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with his rival Gunnar Myrdal. The award was for their work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations; also for their analysis of the inter-dependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. He is thought to be one of the major causes of change from the Keynesian policies of the first part of the 20th century. Instead of governments handling the details of the economy, they went back towards classical liberalism in the 1980s and later. This happened most clearly in the 1980s in the U.S.A. (under Ronald Reagan) and the U.K. (under Margaret Thatcher).

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time

The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.

If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists.

Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.

Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.

It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.

While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.

Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.... Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

The Time is Now.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.

For our course lists, please click here.

May 27, 2022

Friday Filosophy v.04.01.2022

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.

For our course lists, please click here.

Discover more from Learning Without Scars