Karl R. Popper brit

Norms are man-made in the sense that we must blame nobody but ourselves for them; neither nature, nor God.

5. Nature and convention

We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as it's prophets.

Introduction

This failure to distinguish between legal laws and norms on the one hand and natural laws or regularities on the other is characteristic of tribal tabooism: both kinds of law alike ere treated as magical, which makes rational criticism of the man-made taboos as inconceivable as an attempt to improve upon the ultimate wisdom and reason of the laws or regularities of the natural world: all events proceed with the necessity of fate…

2. Heraclitus

Most people in civilized countries nowadays admit racial superiority to be a myth; but even if it were an established fact, it should not create special political rights, though it might create special moral responsibilities for the superior persons.
Analogous demands should be made of those who are intellectually and morally and educationally superior; and I cannot help feeling that the opposite claims of certain intellectualists and moralists only show how little successful their education has been, since it failed to make them aware of their own limitations, and of their Pharisaism.

3. Change and rest

Like machines, institutions multiply our power for good and evil. Like machines, they need intelligent supervision by someone who understands their way of functioning and, most of all, their purpose, since we cannot build them so that they work entirely automatically.

5. Nature and convention

There is nothing that has ever occurred to man which could not be claimed to be „natural”; for if it were not in his nature, how could it have occurred to him?

5. Nature and Convention

To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them that they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them.

6. Totalitarian Justice

Learning to read, and to a lesser degree, to write, are of course the major events in one's intellectual development.

7. oldal