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... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.
--
"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

 

Richard Rorty

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You don't really talk about it in terms of the U.N., you talk about it in terms of the United States and the Soviet Union. If you cannot, by diplomacy, bring the Soviet Union into an alliance with the U.S. to stop this situation it is not going to be stopped.

 

Carl Rowan

 

We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how can one realize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then Reality alone will remain, and we will be That.

 

Ramana Maharshi

 

All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they may have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet. It may do for other countries and other governments to talk about the State supporting religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is Religion which must support the State.

 

Robert Charles Winthrop

 

The government considers it the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered, and solemnly announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop this war on the terms indicated, which are equally just for all nationalities without exception.

 

Vladimir Lenin

 

The innocent sounding First Thesis, taken seriously, forces us to move our attention away from the individual toward humanity. Since there are no limits to the application of reason, and reason does not work instinctively, but requires "trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another," individual human beings do not live long enough to learn the full use of reason. However, we find nature setting a short period for individual lives, but producing a series of generations in which each passes its own accomplishments onto its successor. The only way to make the capability of reasoning consistent with the First Thesis is to assume that rationality is to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

 

Immanuel Kant