UGS Quotes

"In every one," I pronounced, not without a tremble to my voice, "I am grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden of Ts'ui Pên."

borges

"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."

borges

Albert rose. Standing tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk; for the moment his back was to me. I had readied the revolver. I fired with extreme caution. Albert fell uncomplainingly, immediately. I swear his death was instantaneous—a lightning stroke.

borges

Compare the beginning: If Madden had caught him, he'd be in jail waiting to die And he is Multiple paths to the same outcome! Just as with the Liddell Hart quote But that was a misquotation....

borges

Did his plan work? In the same papers? Then the bombing occurred before the Germans could have heard of the murder? Deception? Or self-deception?

borges

From this broken state I passed into an almost abject felicity. I told myself that the duel had already begun and that I had won the first encounter by frustrating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of fate, the attack of my adversary. I argued that this slightest of victories foreshadowed a total victory. I argued (no less fallaciously) that my cowardly felicity proved that I was a man capable of carrying out the adventure successfully.

borges

From this weakness I took strength that did not abandon me. I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

borges

God knows everything So, God knows what I'll do tomorrow But if God knows today what I'm going to do tomorrow, what I'm going to do tomorrow must already be fixed So, what I'm going to do tomorrow is already fixed I have no freedom

borges

Here, then, is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth.

borges

His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal. He read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter.... I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

borges

Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language- religion, letters, metaphysics- all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts.

borges

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space.

borges

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

borges

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he chooses— simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.

borges

In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.

borges

On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure.

borges

The Chief had deciphered this mystery. He knew my problem was to indicate (through the uproar of the war) the city called Albert, and that I had found no other means to do so than to kill a man of that name. He does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness.

borges

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

borges

The bombardment began on June 24th; the attack was intended for June 29th, but was later postponed until July 1st, owing to a momentary break in the weather. This postponement, made at French request, involved not only the spreading out of the ammunition over a longer period, and consequent loss of intensity, but a greater strain on part of the assaulting troops, who, after being keyed up for the effort, had to remain another forty-eight hours in cramped trenches under the exhausting noise of their own gunfire and the enemy's retaliation—conditions made worse by torrential rain which flooded the trenches.

borges

The following statement, dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao, throws an unsuspected light over the whole affair. The first two pages of the document are missing.

borges

The instructions to turn always to the left reminded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point of certain labyrinths. I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts'ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost.

borges

The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden broke in, arrested me. I have been condemned to the gallows. I have won out abominably; I have communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city they must attack.

borges

The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day worked on me, as well as the slope of the road which eliminated any possibility of weariness. The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows.

borges

Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . .

borges

They bombed it yesterday; I read it in the same papers that offered to England the mystery of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert who was murdered by a stranger, one Yu Tsun.

borges

Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him—and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth.

borges

Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

borges

Vaguely I thought that a pistol report can be heard at a great distance. In ten minutes my plan was perfected. The telephone book listed the name of the only person capable of transmitting the message; he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a half hour's train ride away.

borges

magical realism

borges

the garden of the forking paths

borges

Although the professed aim of planning would be that man should cease to be a mere means, in fact—since it would be impossible to take account in the plan of individual likes and dislikes—the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the 'social welfare' or 'the good of the community.

hayek

The question, how this will affect happiness, is always relevant to every moral decision

hayek

The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which reason depends.

hayek

To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently

hayek

a large, complex picture

hayek

centralism-"the most powerful monopolist conceivable"

hayek

individual gifts and bents

hayek

infinite number of good things—any one of them can be achieved only at the sacrifice of others

hayek

on socialism-"the general acceptance of a common Weltanschuung, of a common set of values"

hayek

orientation of our energy and our appetites

hayek

pluralism- many goods

hayek

socialism means slavery

hayek

socialists on socialism-"It hasn't really been tried!" "If only the right people had been in charge!"

hayek

the more the state 'plans,' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

hayek

whether it shall be we who decide what is more, and what is less, important for us, or whether this is to be decided by the planner

hayek

"Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word; so finally I gave up.

murdoch

'...things are falsified from the start.... As soon as I start to describe, I'm done for.... The language just won't let you present it as it really was.'

murdoch

'All things are full of gods.' (Plato, quoting Thales)

murdoch

'But at this rate almost everything one says... turns out to be a sort of lie.' Hugo pondered this. 'I think it is so,' he said with seriousness. 'In that case one oughtn't to talk,' I said. 'I think perhaps one oughtn't to,' said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking how we had been doing nothing else for days on end.

murdoch

'Every man must have a trade. Yours is writing. Mine will be making and mending watches, I hope, if I'm good enough.' Work 'And what about the truth?' I said wildly. 'What about the search for God?' 'What more do you want?' said Hugo. 'God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand.'

murdoch

'The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.' 'So we never really communicate?' 'Well,' he said, 'I suppose actions don't lie.'

murdoch

'Truth lies in blundering on.' 'Oh, to hell with truth!' I told him.... "Actions don't lie, words always do." But now I see that this was all a hallucination.

murdoch

... the movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular.

murdoch

...I felt neither happy nor sad, only rather unreal, like a man shut in a glass. Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing.

murdoch

...every single second has a moral tag....

murdoch

Dave was writing an article for Mind on the incongruity of counterparts. He had been working for some time on the article, which he wrote sitting in front of a mirror, and alternately staring at his reflection and examining his two hands. He had several times tried to explain to me his solution, but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem.

murdoch

He [Hugo] was a man without claims and without reflections. Why had I pursued him? He had nothing to tell me.

murdoch

I am therefore a parasite, and live usually in my friends' houses.

murdoch

I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.... I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

murdoch

Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

murdoch

It is into ourselves that we must look.... Life is made up of details.

murdoch

It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself. To experience this was extremely painful.... When does one ever know a human being?

murdoch

Morality is and ought to be connected to the whole of our being.

murdoch

People know about the difference between good and evil, it takes quite a lot of theorising to persuade them to say or imagine that they do not.

murdoch

That was just what was yours,' I said. 'It was you reflected in Anna, just as that dialogue was you reflected in me.' 'I don't recognize the reflections,' said Hugo.

murdoch

The business of my life lay elsewhere. There was a path which awaited me and which if I failed to take it would lie untrodden forever. How much longer would I delay? This was the substance and all other things were shadows, fit only to distract and deceive.

murdoch

There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound. A gentle refutation of Berkeley.

murdoch

These things were mediocre, I saw it. But I saw too, as it were straight through them, the possibility of doing better—and this possibility was present to me as a strength which cast me lower and raised me higher than I had ever been before.... It was the first day of the world. I was full of that strength which is better than happiness.... It was the morning of the first day.... I smiled with a smile which penetrated my whole being like the sun.

murdoch

Truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence.

murdoch

We all live in the interstices of each other's lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.

murdoch

We live in the present, this strange familiar yet mysterious continuum which is so difficult to describe.This is what is nearest and it matters what kind of place it is

murdoch

Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges the spirit back into the void from which it came.

murdoch

A theory of justice requires three subsidiary principles: acquisition, transfer and rectification.

nozick

By serving these principles the individual bound himself to maintain a severe discipline over himself. Under the shelter of liberal principles and the rule of law, minorities could live and act. Democracy and law —life in common under the law—were synonymous.

ortega y gasset

My thesis, therefore, is this: the very perfection with which the XIXth Century gave an organisation to certain orders of existence has caused the masses benefited thereby to consider it, not as an organised, but as a natural system.Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by these masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being.As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilisation, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.

ortega y gasset

The mass... does not wish to share life with those who are not of it. It has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself.

ortega y gasset

The old democracy was tempered by a generous dose of liberalism and of enthusiasm for law.

ortega y gasset

Today we are witnessing the triumphs of a hyperdemocracy in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure.

ortega y gasset

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the 'reason of unreason.'

ortega y gasset

When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses.... Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made

ortega y gasset

Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it. It is no use speaking of ideas when there is no acceptance of a higher authority to regulate them, a series of standards to which it is possible to appeal in a discussion.These standards are the principles on which culture rests.

ortega y gasset

contextualism

ortega y gasset

our age is characterised by the strange presumption that it is superior to all past time; more than that, by its leaving out of consideration all that is past, by recognising no classical or normative epochs, by looking on itself as a new life superior to an previous forms and irreducible to them.

ortega y gasset

perspectivism

ortega y gasset

the mass-man... his main characteristic lies in that, feeling himself 'common,' he proclaims the right to be common, and refuses to accept any order superior to himself.

ortega y gasset

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

rawls

Social and economic inequalities must be arranged so that they are difference principle and equal opportunity.

rawls

Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.

reagan

It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable Screwtape Letters, wrote: "The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do no need to raise their voices."

reagan

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the US was too strong

reagan

So, I urge you to speak our against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride - the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

reagan

Well, because these "quiet men" do not "raise their voices," because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they're always making "their final territorial demand," some would have us accept them as their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.

reagan

... man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.

sartre

...each person is an absolute choice of self....

sartre

But the first act of bad faith is to flee what it can not flee, to flee what it is.

sartre

If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith. The origin of this risk is the fact that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it is.

sartre

Thus there are no accidents in a life; a community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve:it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it.

sartre

What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover everything which happens to me is mine.

sartre

existence precedes essence

sartre

existentialism

sartre