Don't know nothin' 'bout that

German philosopher G. W. F. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) Hegel was born on this day in 1770.


"What experience and history teach is this," Hegel wrote, "--that people and governments never have learned anything from history."


Yesterday was Women's Equality Day!


"Woman may be said to be an inferior man." -- Aristotle.

Sorry, we forgot all about it. You know how us men are always slighting our women.

And he was quite sure about that

Writer, mathematician, philosopher and humanitarian Bertrand Russell was born on this day in 1872.

"I have always felt respectable people scoundrels," he wrote. And also:

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

I believe this is his birthday

The philosopher Buddha was (supposedly) born on this day in 563 BC. The wise man said:


"Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true."

Profound, I think

Philosopher Rene Descartes ("I think, therefore I am") was born on this day in 1596.

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so." -- Bertrand Russell.

Here's mud in your eye

English philosopher George Moore was born on this day in 1852.

"Humanity is a pigsty," he wrote, "where liars, hypocrites and the obscene in spirit congregate."

God's forever blowing bubbles

Today is the birthday of Francis Bacon, English philosopher and essayist. He wrote:

"The world's a bubble; and the life of man less than a span."

Birth, Marx

Harpo Marx was born today in 1893.


"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought." – John Kenneth Galbraith.

Today's Perverse Verse:

I think, therefore I am, said Descartes,
But for our part,
We think that an awful lot of people with strong opinions
-- And their minions --
With their brain waves so exceedingly faint,
Ain't.

   Descartes had said that you could believe in your own thinking, but Sully doubted that, because his own thoughts were so balled-up that he didn’t have any faith in them as an article of belief. Even if Descartes had meant that the mere act of thinking, never mind the thoughts themselves, constituted a basis for belief. If your thoughts were hopelessly confused and senseless, what authority did they have to prove that you existed? To prove anything? Maybe the fact that you saw that they were senseless proved that you were a rational creature after all? I think that I think, therefore I am. But if that thought led nowhere…   --  Chapter 13, The Misforgotten.

Free at last!...Now what?

Today is Constitution Day in Puerto Rico!

Unbridled freedom, that was the problem, Plato had said. It led to anarchy, then to tyranny. It hung heavy on everyone’s hands. When a man was free to do what he wanted he copied everyone else. In lying, cheating, stealing, anything to pass the time. The banality of evil, the dreariness of it. Handed down from generation to generation. Every age might invent a new way to fuck with you, to annihilate you, but the impulse was the same. Boredom, caused by too much freedom.
                                                                                                         -- Chapter 16, The Misforgotten

Who wants company?

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher, was born on this day in 1623. He said:

"We shall die alone."

As for God, Pascal had said that you might as well believe, because even if you were wrong nothing was lost, and if you were right, so much was to be gained. Which struck Sully as a pretty flimsy hook to hang a religion or a philosophy on, not to mention valid only if you bought into the assumption that God operated on the rewards-and-punishment system. That was a pretty threadbare kind of God to believe in, in his opinion. What kind of God made belief a prerequisite for His favor, anyway? A God who was afraid He wasn’t really real, it sounded like. -- Chapter 13, The Misforgotten.