quotes Flashcards
Rousseau on human nature
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Hobbes on human nature
“The life of a man is solitary, poor, [nasty, brutish] and short.”
Augustine’s religious experience [sitting under the fig tree]
- confessions book 8.2
“,as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of my confidence flooded into my heart and all darkness of doubt was dispelled.”
before the fall: friendship > sex
- city of God book XIV ch.24
“the man would have sowed the seed and woman would have conceived the child when their sexual organs had been aroused by the will,… and had not been excited by lust.”
Augustine on the shame of feeling lust
- city of God book
“Human nature then is, without any doubt, ashamed about lust, and rightly ashamed.”
Augustine confessions - concupiscence
“the snare of the concupiscence awaits me in the very process of passing from the discomfort of hunger to the contentment which comes when it is satisfied.”
Augustine on the misuse of free will
“Hence from the misuse of free will there started a chain of disasters: mankind is led from that original perversion, a kind of corruption at the root, right up to the disaster of the second death.”
Richard Dawkins on sadomasochism and original sin
- The God delusion
“What kind of ethical philosophy is that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? But now, the sadomasochism. God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus in order that he should be tortured and executed in atonement for the hereditary sin of Adam.”
Reinhold Niebuhr on pessimism
- moral man and immoral society
“The perennial tragedy of human history is that those who cultivate the spiritual elements usually do so by divorcing themselves from or misunderstanding the problems of collective man, where the brutal elements are most obvious… to the end of history the peace of the world, as Augustine observed, must be gained by the strife. It will not be perfect peace.”
