User:Naaman Brown

Quotes that influenced me as a teenager

"`He that is born to be a man,' says Wieland in his Peregrinus Proteus, `neither should nor can be anything nobler, greater, or better than a man.' The fact is, that in efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it. Your reformist demigods are merely devils turned inside out."--Edgar Allan Poe in Marginalia

"Once an argument has been classed as `positional,' it is regarded as having been demolished, since the `position' attributed to it is always selected with a perjorative intent. The choice of the position selected is an expression of the personal antipathies of the individual critic, and the same arguments can therefore be attributed to any one of a variety of `positions,' according to what comes most readily to the critic's hand. The wealth of variations afforded by such tactics is well exemplified by the variety of classifications to which I have myself been subjected. On my religious `position' I have been classified as a Protestant, a Catholic, an anti-Semite and as a typical Jew; politically, as a Liberal, a Fascist, a (Nazi) and a Conservative; and on my theoretical `position,' as a Platonist, a Neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, a disciple of Hegel, an existentialist, a historical relativist and an empirical skeptick; in recent years the suspicion has frequently been voiced that I am a Christian. All these classifications have been made by university professors and people with academic degrees." --Eric Voegelin in Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought, edited by Albert Hunold. (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1961), p. 280.

"... men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can't be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection... they find only death... fire... loss... disillusionment... the end of everything that's gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can't be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself." --Peter Graves in It Conquered the World (Roger Corman film, 1956)

"It is laughable to observe how easily any system of Philosophy can be proven false; but then is it not mournful to perceive the impossibility of even fancying any particular system to be true?" -- Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

[I transcribed the Voegelin quote from my early 1960s high school notes and researched the full cite more recently.]

Always {Show Preview} before {Save Page}.

If you can't KISS (keep it short & simple), at minimum endeavour to eschew obfuscation. (Best advice I sometimes follow.)

Remember to Refresh: cached pages may make you think you are logged in when you are not. 76.7.181.195 (talk) 14:56, 13 August 2009 (UTC)