Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2. Translated by E. F. J. Payne, Clarendon Press, 1974, p. 253.
This was true at the time for most nations and their activities—the world was, and was perceived of, as a zero sum game. But with the modern world, much of international activity is not zero sum. In foreign trade both parties to a transaction might win. In scientific research, a win for one nation increases the benefit from all nations who use that research or build upon it.
Alexander’s men won the battle, and the Greeks then ruled.
with Russia over the independence of Berlin and West Germany
See Benedict Spinosa for an earlier absense or war view. Also, JFK more recently.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.
