This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?
Interpretation
The potato, while tasteless, is a vital sustenance for the hardworking, illustrating the value of utility over taste.
Denis Diderot's quote highlights the potato's role as a fundamental source of nourishment, especially for laborers. Despite its lack of flavor and the criticism it receives for being 'windy,' the potato offers substantial health benefits and sustenance to those who require energy for their demanding work. This reflects a broader philosophical perspective on the merits of practicality and utility in life, where something may not be pleasing to the senses but serves an important purpose.
In practice
In a speech about food security, one might reference Diderot's quote to emphasize the importance of staple foods.
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
Sabotage did not involve loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become a reality.
As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.
It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutalized his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.
To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions ... We have thus two different kinds of statement, both of which are necessary ingredients of a complete causal explanation.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.
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