Quote #63

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

More from Wystan Hugh Auden

  1. No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
  2. A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
  3. When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
  4. The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him bett…
  5. Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human d…
  6. The idea of a sacrificial victim is not new; but that it should be the victim who chooses to be sacrificed, and the sacrificers who deny th…
  7. A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or wo…
  8. The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

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