[Quatelet’s first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the s...
We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.
If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be l...
From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to he...
Successful people, like Morgan and Rockefeller, just had a better grasp of social tendencies than unsuccessful people
[Emerson] saw, in the beginning, no difference between abolitionism and the institutionalized religion he had rejected in the Divinity School address. They were both ways of discouraging people from t...
[According to Holmes], ‘Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should...
When Holmes emerged as a consistent judicial defender of economic reform and of free speech, he became a hero to progressives and civil libertarians—to people like Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Walter...
The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to...
No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.
In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovere...
…Peirce’s theory of signs—there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.
When we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are.
We do not (on Holmes’s reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we n...
Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and pra...
Abbott had also impressed on Holmes, possibly by his conversation but certainly by his example, the belief that nobility of character consists in doing one’s job with indifference to ends,
Organized study deadens the mind, and that genuine insight arises spontaneously from the individual soul.
[Addams] found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or r...
[According to Peirce] ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ … nominalism...
When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, on January 1, 1863, Abbott wrote from the front to his aunt to explain that [t]he president’s proclamation is of course received with universal dis...