abstract principles Quotes

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

I must contend that the liberty and perhaps the lives of so many valuable & estimable Americans ought not to be sacrificed to points of honor, taken in the abstract.

If what charms you is nothing but abstract principles, sit down and turn them over quietly in your mind: but never dub yourself a Philosopher.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

...at this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women'srights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

The unique, compelling, and earnest voice that characterizes Jedediah’s weekly columns comes alive with increased vitality in OUTNUMBERED. She shatters leftist stereotypes about conservatives and exposes the myth of liberal tolerance as she relates her interactions with liberals in everyday life. This narrative, interlaced with commentary and impressions, gives us insight into liberals that books merely about abstract principles do not capture. A fascinating read.

Maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they'll ever be realised. But that's ok, it's a service.

Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it.

There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious - in the abstract, anyway.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.