Friday, May 17, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Terry Pratchett

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Oh dear, I'm feeling political today. It's just that it's dawned on me that 'zero tolerance' only seems to mean putting extra police in poor, run-down areas, and not in the Stock Exchange.

 
Terry Pratchett

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Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

 
Karl Marx
 

The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.

 
Joseph Schumpeter
 

But the Teuton has not, unfortunately, kept up his guard. Magnanimously, he conceded to alien blood those same rights which he had gained for himself as a result of his great sacrifices through the centuries. He carried tolerance of religious diversity and scientific speculation into areas where he would have done better to lay down strict limitations; the areas involving the creation of the national state and of the folkish type. Such are the prerequisites for organic life in general. He failed to see that a spirit of tolerance, as between catholic and protestant religious convictions concerning God and immortality, was not at all the same thing as toleration of anti-Germanic character values. Surely it is obvious that there is no equivalence of rights as between the stock market manipulator and the heroic man; or those who follow the immoral and non-Germanic laws of the Talmud cannot be accorded equal rights in shaping the national life as a Hanseatic merchant or a German officer. From this sin against the own blood sprang the national guilt ...

 
Alfred Rosenberg
 

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

 
Jacob Bronowski
 

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

 
Jacob Bronowski
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