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"If we define co-operative action as rational and any deviation from it irrational, we must agree with Spinoza that conflict results from the irrationality of men. But if we examine the requirements of rational action, we find that even in an example as simple as the stag hunt we have to assume that the reason of each leads to an identical definition of interest, that each will draw the same conclusion as to the methods appropriate to meet the original situation, that all will agree instantly on the action required by any chance incidents that raise the question of altering the original plan, and that each can rely completely on the steadfastness of purpose of all the others. Perfectly rational action requires not only the perception that our welfare is tied up with the welfare of others but also a perfect appraisal of details so that we can answer the question: Just how in each situation is it tied up with everyone else's?" Kenneth Waltz   "The tragic world is a world of action, and action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others." Andrew Cecil Bradley   "The action of any comedy is less interesting—certainly less memorable—than the discussions it contains. A tragedy whose plot cannot be remembered in the strict order of its events is no tragedy at all; the events must create their own order, from which there is no escape, or else they will have no meaning for the mind. This must have been what Aristotle meant when he said the soul of a tragedy was its plot; the action was everything. In comedy there is action too, or we should have no story; but it is most interesting for what can be said about it before and after it is done." Mark Van Doren   "One cannot understand something and act upon it at the same time; when we are acting upon an object, we put ourselves in a utilitarian, possessive, and manipulative mode, which makes us incapable of grasping its true meaning. On the contrary, a scholar is someone who takes a step back, stays still, and observes everything at leisure (scholē in Greek, from which our word derives). Scholarship, then, ends where action starts. Someone else may use scholarly knowledge to devise a practical course of action, but that enterprise is not scholarly. Those who seek to understand the world and those who want to change it are two different breeds of people, following separate paths." Costica Bradatan   "The baby's crying in a family, the instinct of workmanship at the factory, the threat of dismissal as a housekeeper, the lure of profit in making dresses, the offer of a shilling: these are all persuasions to courses of action, connecting heart and hand. Without persuasion the theory of economics is incomplete. And so it is incomplete without an account of language, language viewed not merely as 'conveying' or 'communicating' information originally 'dispersed' (in Hayek's terminology of 1948), but language as rhetoric, that is, moving to action. The socialists' favored form of speech is an order, 'Go mine coal.' The Austrian economist's favored form is an informative statement, 'I like purple.' Neither of these quite do the economic task. You can be in the right job, and know exactly what to do; but unless the boss or the culture or the market or you yourself in the council of your soul has exercised sweet talk on your will, there you sit, ready to work, enlightened—but unmoved." Dierdre McCloskey   "Intimate conviction, needing support from nothing external, came to be seen as the true guide to political action. After the Napoleonic wars, a society of radical students, the Burschenschaft, was set up in the university of Jena to work for unity and democracy in Germany. One of its leaders preached that the righteous man recognizes no external law; once convinced that a course of action was right, he had unconditionally and uncompromisingly to realize the dictates of reason as revealed to him. Among the adepts this was known simply as 'the principle,' and those who followed it hence termed themselves the 'Unconditionals'; they took Jesus as their hero, for they considered him a martyr to conviction, and their association-song proclaimed: 'A Christ thou shalt become.' One of these students, Carl Sand, acquired the conviction that the writer, Kotzebue, was an enemy of the German people, and decided to kill him. Having done the deed, he left a paper by the side of his victim on which was inscribed: 'A Christ thou shalt become.' The inscription, of course, referred to Sand, not to his victim." Elie Kedourie   "Students of grammar are aware that in certain languages, among them Greek, there exists a verbal expression between the active and the passive voices which is known as the median or middle. At times this is a mere paradox of grammar, like the humorous quirks that occur in the assignment of nominal gender; at other times, it has a reflexive sense. But there is also a class of verbs in which a middle-ground exists. Consider dunamai, 'to be able.' What is ability? In one sense, it is something that is within us, that we hold passively. On the other hand, it is a type of potential energy, containing if not action at least the promise of action. It is within this unique middle-ground that we find tragic fate. The protagonist does what he does neither because he is forced to, nor because it is all his own idea. Vaster currents are moving. Conceivably he could avoid them. We can imagine—remotely—Achilles opting to return to his anonymous and lengthy life. But then he would not be Achilles. The decision that he makes becomes himself, becomes what he is. In this sense the elusive notion of fate is closer to the concept of character. It is reflected in the reciprocity between the tragic hero as individual and as leader of a nation or race. For although he may lean toward one pole or the other, there is never a completely defined dichotomy between the public and the private man. And this is what Hegel means by the world-historical individual." David Lenson   "Character, in any sense in which we can get at it, is action, and action is plot, and any plot which hangs together, even if it pretend to interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle, plays upon our emotion, our suspense, by means of personal references. We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are." Henry James   "If a proposition is to be applied to action, it has to be embraced, or believed without reservation. There is no room for doubt, which can only paralyze action. But the scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them. The desire to learn forbids him to be perfectly cocksure that he knows already. Besides positive science can only rest on experience; and experience can never result in absolute certainty, exactitude, necessity, or universality." Charles Sanders Pierce   "Men may speculate as they will—they may talk of patriotism—they may draw a few examples from ancient story of great achievements performed by its influence; but, whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient basis, for conducting a long and bloody war, will find themselves deceived in the end. We must take the passions of men, as nature has given them, and those principles as a guide, which are generally the rule of action. I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward. For a time it may, of itself, push men to action—to bear much—to encounter difficulties; but it will not endure unassisted by interest." George Washington   "Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the 'didn't read, but disapprove' mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the kollektiv—no matter what destructive action was next on the kollektiv's agenda. You pre-emptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group. And this is understandable in a way: Merging with the crowd feels much better than standing alone." Izabella Tabarovsky   "It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians'—and readers'—attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today's world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty." Monika Kopacz   "Most new products and new businesses fail, and most new scientific hypotheses turn out to be wrong. There is no shame in being wrong, and even the most successful operators in those fields make significant mistakes. The problem is not being wrong but rather persisting in wrongness—failing to get less wrong over time. Scientists and entrepreneurs may be individually arrogant, but both of their underlying models of operation depend upon openness to discovering that one's beliefs are wrong and taking action to correct them." Kevin Williamson   "Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North. No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class. Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half." Jason Riley   "The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world." Hannah Arendt   "Of course, in a way, Hamlet was a man of action—look how he was always killing people." Malcolm Bradbury   "As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action—or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting—they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets. These sacrifices do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money but comprise in addition an indefinite amount of loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety—alternatives to be compared with joys of parenthood that are being subjected to a crucial analysis of increasing severity. The implication of this is not weakened but strengthened by the fact that the balance sheet is likely to be incomplete, perhaps even fundamentally wrong." Joseph Schumpeter   "The author's deepest pride, as I have experienced it, is not in his incidental wisdom but in his ability to keep an organized mass of images moving forward, to feel life engendering itself under his hands. But no doubt, fiction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do. Insights of all kinds are welcome; but no wisdom will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, and a perhaps savage wish to hold, through your voice, another soul in thrall." John Updike   "If evil consequences flow from an action done out of pure conviction, this type of person holds the world, not the doer, responsible, or the stupidity of others, or the will of God who made them thus. A man who subscribes to the ethic of responsibility, by contrast, will make allowances for precisely these everyday shortcomings in people. He has no right, as Fichte correctly observed, to presuppose goodness and perfection in human beings. He does not feel that he can shuffle off the consequences of his own actions, as far as he could foresee them, and place the burden on the shoulders of others. He will say, 'These consequences are to be attributed to my actions.' The person who subscribes to the ethic of conviction feels 'responsible' only for ensuring that the flame of pure conviction (for example, the flame of protest against the injustice of the social order) is never extinguished. To kindle that flame again and again is the purpose of his actions, actions which, judged from the point of view of their possible success, are utterly irrational, and which can and are only intended to have exemplary value." Max Weber   "To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness. Of course, man may hope contrary to all reason, and hope has its pleasures even when unreasonable. It may sustain him for a time; but it cannot survive the repeated disappointments of experience indefinitely. What more can the future offer him than the past, since he can never reach a tenable condition nor even approach the glimpsed ideal? Thus, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. Shall action as such be considered agreeable? First, only on condition of blindness to its uselessness. Secondly, for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half veil the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with the lack of ease which it, itself, entails." Emile Durkheim