People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
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...mammalian embryos, regardless of their sex chromosome constitutions, have an inherent tendency to develop the female phenotype; the mammalian male read more
...mammalian embryos, regardless of their sex chromosome constitutions, have an inherent tendency to develop the female phenotype; the mammalian male is essentially a female that has been exposed to androgenic steroid hormones.
The meaning of life is that it stops.
The meaning of life is that it stops.
Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation read more
Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication is the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, "it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.".
...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established read more
...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a read more
In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him read more
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows read more
It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous...The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
