Yar

4 Jun 2012, 11:48 AM

Who would want to read your biography?

Yar

4 Jun 2012, 11:48 AM

Who would want to read your biography?

Yar

4 Jun 2012, 03:10 PM

I've meant besides his mom

Nemesis

4 Jun 2012, 04:14 PM

You mumma so stoopid, she made you.

From Chapter 1

 

By far the most interesting of the Chinese political philosophers were the
Taoists, founded by the immensely important but shadowy figure of Lao Tzu. Little is known about Lao Tzu' s life, but he was apparently a contemporary and personal acquaintance of Confucius. Like the latter he came originally from the state of Sung and was a descendant of lower aristocracy of the Yin dynasty. Both men lived in a time of turmoil, wars and statism, but each reacted very differently. For Lao Tzu worked out the view that the individual and his happiness was the key unit of society. I f social institutions hampered the individual's flowering and his happiness, then those institutions should be reduced or abolished altogether. To the individualist Lao Tzu, government, with its 'laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox' , was a vicious oppressor of the individual, and 'more to be feared than fierce tigers'.
Government, in sum, must be limited to the smallest possible minimum; 'inaction' became the watchword for Lao Tzu, since only inaction of government can permit the individual to flourish and achieve happiness. [...]
The worst of government interventions, according to Lao Tzu, was heavy taxation and war. 'The people hunger because their superiors consume an excess in taxation' and, 'where armies have been stationed, thorns and brambles grow. After a great war, harsh years of famine are sure to follow'. The wisest course is to keep the government simple and inactive, for then
the world 'stabilizes itself'. As Lao Tzu put it: 'Therefore, the Sage says: I take no action yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves. . . '

From Chapter 1

 

Following Cicero, Stoic natural law doctrines heavily influenced the Roman jurists of the second and third centuries AD, and thus helped shape the great structures of Roman law
which became pervasive in Western civilization. Cicero's influence was assured by his lucid and sparkling style, and by the fact that he was the first Stoic to write in Latin, the language of Roman law and of all thinkers and writers in the West down to the end of the seventeenth century. Moreover, Cicero's and other Latin writings have been far better preserved than the
fragmentary remains we have from the Greeks.
Cicero's writings were heavily influenced by the Greek Stoic leader, the aristocratic Panaetius of Rhodes (c.185-11 0 BC) and as a young man he travelled there to study with his follower, Posidonius of Rhodes (135-51 BC), the greatest Stoic of his age. There is no better way to sum up Cicero's Stoic natural law philosophy than by quoting what one of his followers called his 'almost divine words'. Paraphrasing and developing the definition and insight of Chrysippus, Cicero wrote:

There is a true law, right reason, agreeable to nature, known to all men, constant
and eternal, which calls to duty by its precepts, deters from evil by its prohibition
. . . This law cannot be departed from without guilt . . . Nor is there one law at
Rome and another at Athens, one thing now and another afterward; but the same
law, unchanging and eternal, binds all races of man and all times; and there is one
common, as it were, master and ruler - God, the author, promulgator and mover
of this law. Whoever does not obey i t departs from [his true] self, contemns the
nature of man and inflicts upon himself the greatest penalties. . .

Cicero also contributed to Western thought a great anti-statist parable which resounded through the centuries, a parable that revealed the nature of rulers of state as nothing more than pirates writ large. Cicero told the story of a pirate who was dragged into the court of Alexander the Great. When Alexander denounced him for piracy and brigandage and asked the pirate what impulse had led him to make the sea unsafe with his one little ship, the pirate trenchantly replied, 'the same impulse which has led you [Alexander] to make the whole world unsafe'.