Only by these facts can we explain the spoiled-child psychology of the urban masses. The scientists have given him the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, an false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have. Since the prime object of the latter is to appease, he has received concessions…
Read moreDostoyevsky on Reason
In short, anything can be said of world history, anything conceivable even by the most disordered imagination. There is only one that that you can’t say — that it had anything to do with reason. The very first word would choke you. Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, p. 37
Read moreDostoyevsky on Free Will
If men really turned out to be piano-keys, and if it was proved to them by science and mathematics, even then they would not see reason, but on the contrary would deliberately do something out of sheer ingratitude in order, in fact, to have their own way. And if they had not the means to…
Read moreDostoyevsky on Human Caprice
Now I ask you, what can one expect of man, as a creature endowed with such strange qualities? Shower him with all earthly blessings, plunge him so deep into happiness that nothing is visible but the bubbles rising to the surface of his happiness, as if it were water; give him such economic prosperity that…
Read moreDostoyevsky on Human Folly
And here is something this is always cropping up: people are always appearing who are terribly sensible and moral, terribly sage, terrible lovers of the human race, who really set themselves, as the goal of their whole lives, to conduct themselves in teh noblest and most rational manner and let their light shine before their…
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