Schelling Quotes

Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence. ~ Thomas C. Schelling

Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

AT&T's telephone lines and Western Union's telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And ~ Eric Schlosser

I use game theory to help myself understand conflict situations and opportunities. ~ Thomas Schelling

All phenomena are correlated in one absolute and necessary law, from which they can all be deduced. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks. ~ Thomas C. Schelling

Man becomes greater in proportion to knowing himself and his faculties. Let him become conscious of what he is and he will soon also learn what he should be. ~ Felix Schelling

I do think it's often a mistake to call them climate skeptics. I think they're deniers, just as I think president Ahmadinejad of iran who claims not to believe that the Holocaust occurred. ~ Thomas Schelling

When I used to theorize about a nuclear standoff, I didn't really have to understand what was happening inside the Soviet Union. It is a lot harder now to build a theory that can encompass all the complications of today's conflicts. ~ Thomas Schelling

All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning? ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Only he who knows God is truly moral. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

It Doesn't Matter the Cost, It matters if it works or Not.... ~ Addison Schelling

The link established by Christian theology between oikonomia and history is crucial to an understanding of Western philosophy of history. In particular, it is possible to say that the concept of history in German idealism, from Hegel to Schelling and even up to Feuerbach, is nothing besides an attempt to think the "economic" link between the process of divine revelation and history (adopting Schelling's terms, which we have quoted earlier, the "co-belonging" of theology and oikonomia). It is curious that when the Hegelian Left breaks with this theological concept, it can do so only on condition that the economy in a modern sense, which is to say, the historical self-production of man, is placed at the center of the historical process. In this sense, the Hegelian Left replaces divine economy with a purely human economy. ~ Giorgio Agamben

We at the Bureau have the most exciting and satisfying jobs in the world. In a society that stresses individual achievement - where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps - the Legal Aid Bureau helps those without boots. By providing access to justice to tens of thousands of Marylanders each year, Legal Aid attorneys and support staff bring equity and stability to society. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Nature shall be the visible spirit, and spirit, invisible nature. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

The human brain is the highest bloom of the whole organic metamorphosis of the earth. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Coercion depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, would govern the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly, it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be kept in reserve. ~ Thomas C. Schelling

Nobody is going to give away the farm in Kyoto. It is not anybody's to give away. And even if the United States Senate would actually ratify a bad treaty, anything called for under the treaty would require legislation passed through both houses. ~ Thomas Schelling

That which Dante saw written on the door of the inferno must be written in a different sense also at the entrance to philosophy: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Those who look for true philosophy must be bereft of all hope, all desire, all longing. They must not wish for anything, not know anything, must feel completely bare and impoverished. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the source of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the nexus of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Without contradiction, there would be no life, no movement, no progress, a deadly slumber of all forces. ~ Schelling

I never consciously choose what I'm going to work on next; I don't have an agenda beyond that attraction. Fortunately, my wonderful agent, Christopher Schelling, knows how I think and points me toward things I might like, which is how I started writing Y.A. ~ Kathe Koja

One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

There is no greatness without a continual solicitation to madness which, while it must be overcome, must never be completely lacking. One might profit by classifying men in this respect. The one kind are those in whom there is no madness at all ... and are so-called men of intellect whose works and deeds are nothing but cold works and deeds of the intellect.... But where there is no madness, there is, to be sure, also no real, active, living intellect. For wherein is intellect to prove itself but in the conquest, mastery, and ordering of madness? ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius. ~ Felix Schelling

To achieve great things we must be self-confined ... mastery is revealed in limitation. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

I sometimes wish we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening-you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth-that would get people very concerned about climate change. ~ Thomas Schelling