{"id":1358,"date":"2011-07-29T03:28:57","date_gmt":"2011-07-29T10:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=1358"},"modified":"2011-07-28T17:36:18","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T00:36:18","slug":"quote-for-the-day-106","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2011\/07\/29\/quote-for-the-day-106\/","title":{"rendered":"Quote for the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While Paine&#8217;s scientific skepticism ate away at the pomp and pretense of European nobility, the findings of eighteenth-century science afforded him an impression of the universe as based on harmounious laws, which in turn implied that human society too should be lawful and harmonious.  This was very different from the widely held opinion, still voiced today, that an inherently lawless and violent humanity will descend into chaos unless held in check by authoritarian rule, &#8220;Such governments,&#8221; Paine argued, &#8220;consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privlege; <em>that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them<\/em>; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.&#8221;  Free governments work the other way round, building on foundations of liberty and justice.  No king is required for them to function, any more than a master cat is needed to tell all the world&#8217;s cats how to catch mice, or angels to usher the planets in their orbits.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Thomas Ferris, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Science-Liberty-Democracy-Reason-Nature\/dp\/0060781513\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#038;qid=1311899724&#038;sr=8-1\">The Science of Liberty<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<div class='kindleWidget kindleLight' ><img src=\"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-content\/plugins\/send-to-kindle\/media\/white-15.png\" \/><span>Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While Paine&#8217;s scientific skepticism ate away at the pomp and pretense of European nobility, the findings of eighteenth-century science afforded him an impression of the universe as based on harmounious laws, which in turn implied that human society too should &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2011\/07\/29\/quote-for-the-day-106\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1359,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions\/1359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}