Well aware of both the continuity and contingency of human affairs, Adams and Madison searched the works of Tacitus and Voltaire and Locke like carpenters rummaging through their assortment of tools, knowing that all the pediments were jury-rigged, all the provisional, all the alliances temporary.
Lewis H. LaphamRelated topics
assortment contingency continuity human knowing well affairs works locke madison TacitusRelated quotes
The question is - and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer - is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says "no". Well if that person - human life is not a person - then I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, "we're going to decide who are people and who are not people".
Rick Santorum
The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental” production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.
Stephen Jay Gould
Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.
Hannah Arendt
Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.
Robert Nozick