Constitutions Quotes (page 11)
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly...
Aldous Huxley
It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would youcare to try it?"No, indeed," I answered brusquely. "My constitution has not gotover the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extrastrain upon it."He smiled at my vehemence. "Perhaps you are right, Watson," hesaid. "I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I findit, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to themind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I foughtin a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians andbody snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened,though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest,low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.
Kurt Vonnegut
Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few...
James Q. Wilson
Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue...
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ma? is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he ha? a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best...
Lionel Trilling