R. W. K. Paterson

"A world in to whose settled meaning he [the egoist] had committed himself would be a world to which he had alienated himself. His self-possession would be at an end, for the world which he had begun by possessing would at last have come to possess him."

"The refusal to make the truth of nihilism one’s own and build one’s life entirely within its shadow is indeed a refusal of existentialism itself."

"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."

"Political power, social prowess, monetary reward, mere physical well-being: towards these things he [the patrician] is indifferent, and perhaps contemptuous, for they have no part to play in a life well lived but can too readily become the food of souls starved of real meaning and achievement. No reasonable creature would waste a single hour of his life pursuing such things for their own sakes. When they figure in our attempts to see what shape our lives may take, they merely obstruct the view."

"In a sense the plebeian has no history. He drudges, recruits his pathetic strength, and reproduces drudges. This is true whether the plebeian, man or woman, works in a field, factory, or office, … whether he continues his drudgery by tilling his meagre vegetable patch or decorating his suburban bungalow, and whether he takes his ease over a cock-fight, in a Victorian gin-palace, or somnolent before a colour television set in Wolverhampton. The fact that such activities and pastimes can be painstakingly recorded and taught as history does not mean that they are worthy of notice, except as warnings and admonitions."

"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’."