R. W. K. Paterson - Men Quotes

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Although he [the plebeian] cannot deny that selfless courage and unswerving rectitude—indeed all the qualities of the patrician—exist as dreams in men's minds, his mission is to destroy any belief that they have ever influenced, or ever could influence, the motive, character, and conduct of actual men and women. Whenever such ideals are put before us, he wants us to react to them as simply unbelievable.

R. W. K. Paterson
We want to know not merely what men have been, even the best men of their day, but what men can and ought to be.

R. W. K. Paterson
It is rare to find the ideal of the patrician standing alone, not joining hands, albeit unavoidably and sometimes most reluctantly, with the ideals of very different human types. Even Plato's Guardians, who have had the vision of The Good, are presented first of all as ideals rulers of earthly men, although Plato will soon openly declare that the commonwealth of which they are master is 'set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, to found one in himself, and whether it exists or ever will exist is no matter, for this is the only commonwealth in who politics he can ever take part'.

R. W. K. Paterson
Men are admittedly social beings, language-using beings, tool-using beings, and so on. However, any serious philosophical anthropology has to recognize that first and foremost we are evaluating beings.

R. W. K. Paterson
There are individuals who are haunted by self-doubt, whose attitude to life is negative and distrustful, or who exist in a state of confusion about what they are and what they can become. … Unlike physical deprivation or obvious social injustice, evils like these strike at the very roots of human life. When men can no longer picture themselves as worthy of existing, it scarcely matters whether they have the means of existing.

R. W. K. Paterson
There are individuals … who propagate lessons inviting self-abasement, bitterness, self-waste, and cynicism; there are those who high pride, like that of Lucifer, is to dethrone everything they perceive as superior and summoning men to what lies above them.

R. W. K. Paterson
Far from invalidating the ideal, the fact that men's behaviours is in opposition to it invalidates their behaviour. We measure the cloth by the yardstick, not the yardstick by the cloth.

R. W. K. Paterson
One of the most prevalent fallacies is the so-called genetic fallacy, which tempts men to argue that the first lowly origins of a thing demonstrate what it essentially is even in its most highly developed forms. Psychoanalysis and anthropologists have sometimes specialized in tracing the golden fruits to their grubby roots, and they have had some success in convincing the credulous that greatness is only triviality writ large. A kindred fallacy—which to state is to expose—teaches that the surest way of understanding a type is to inspect its poorest instances.

R. W. K. Paterson
Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists, who notoriously decline to distinguish between the value judgements men make and the moral realities about which men make these judgments, are occupationally prone to treat all value judgements, however sharply opposed, as if they were of equal merit.

R. W. K. Paterson