How To Calculate Direct And Indirect Quotes

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

Richard Feynman had to say this about energy in his 1961 lecture: “There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law – it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.” All significant philosophers and scientists throughout history were in their own right, right if we consider the context, time, and place, the point from which they observed the world by the means available to them. If we understand this context, we know how much harder it was for them to decipher the world previously unknown, except as an experience without fundamental and deeper understanding. In this sense, all these philosophers and scientists were, in a way, “right,” even when they were “not” right. Correctness or wrongness of their ideas and opinions shall be measured more by how they helped our understanding and ideas developed directly from their thoughts. Even if they were in some way wrong, great ideas helped our ideas develop and allowed the formation and formulations of great ideas that will follow. Quality and potential of insights and ideas are more important than strict correctness without any potential. Progress in human history would not be possible without following the traces of long-bygone giants (as Newton understood them). We can hardly produce any new important question that ancient Greek philosophers did not pose. The whole idea of Western philosophy, as it is, would not be possible without the ancient Greeks. This statement holds even when we talk about the modern era’s greatest philosophers, starting with Descartes and culminating in the works of the great German philosophers Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the Dutch Spinoza, and others. Almost all central questions or problems treated by these philosophers were already postulated, discussed, or touched, directly or indirectly, by the great ancient philosophers who paved the way for the others.