The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
Interpretation
Fear of poverty can corrupt the integrity of educated individuals and society as a whole.
William James highlights the detrimental impact that the fear of poverty has on the educated classes. This pervasive fear can lead to moral decay, influencing decisions and values in ways that prioritize financial security over ethical principles, ultimately harming the fabric of civilization itself.
In practice
In a discussion about economic policies, one might quote James to emphasize the need for ethical considerations over mere profit.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.
Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?
All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
And simple truth miscalled simplicity
When the Way governs the world, the proud stallions drag dung carriages. When the Way is lost to the world, war horses are bred outside the city.
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