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TST: New Content – Quotes, Read-Aloud

Latest 5

The 5 latest stories.

One-minute tidbits.

1.

Philosophy Quote.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”.

  • Carl Sagan.
  • 1979.

Carl Sagan’s famous line was popularized in Broca’s Brain in 1979. It reached a wider audience through Cosmos in 1980. That’s when I first heard it. I was 15 years old when Cosmos aired which was a seminal moment in my life. 

The deeper idea is older. In 1748, David Hume used a similar principle:

“A wise man…proportions his belief to the evidence.”

Sagan gave it its modern scientific voice. In context, the quote is not anti-wonder. It is anti-carelessness. It says the more a claim challenges what we already know about reality, the more evidence it needs before we raise our confidence in it.

For Sagan, and me, science did not kill spirituality; it deepened and sorted it. Stars, evolution, atoms, life, death, and cosmic scale were sources of humility and reverence. But his awe stayed disciplined. If someone says meditation brings peace, modest evidence may be enough because the claim fits ordinary human experience. If someone says meditation opens a portal to a hidden realm, the evidence burden rises. This is calibration: reality first, awe second, certainty only when earned.

The Why Truth Requires Reality article explains why truth is alignment with reality, and belief is confidence in that alignment. Calibration is the process of adjusting confidence to the kind and quality of support behind a claim. Empirical claims answer to observation and testing. Rational claims answer to logic and coherence. Speculative claims may remain meaningful, but they should be held with humility. Disproven claims should be released as truth. This is how spirituality stays honest: not by rejecting wonder, but by ranking confidence properly when wonder reaches into the material world.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 2 weeks ago.

2.

Philosophy Quote.

“The historian without his facts is rootless…the facts without their historian are…meaningless.”.

  • E. H. Carr.
  • 1961.

Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892. The British historian, diplomat, and theorist of international relations was best known for What Is History? and his fourteen-volume history of Soviet Russia. Carr challenged the older idea that history is simply a neutral record of facts. His full quote from 1961 captures his view on history well:

“The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless”

Carr’s quote supports Empirical Narrative Realism because it holds together both sides of the historical process. The “facts” are the surviving traces. The historian supplies the story using them. The past happened in the material world, and the practice of history is reconstruction.

The Idea of Ideas sharpens that interaction into categories: the past event was empirical, the surviving traces are empirical, and the historical story is rational. It also adds the language of confidence. Some historical stories are strongly aligned with reality, some are weak, and some collapse when reality pushes back.

Carr’s quote also reflects his wider worldview. He embraced reality and rejected naïve objectivism. The idea that historians can simply gather facts, arrange them in order, and let “history” speak for itself. Historians do more than collect objective facts like stones on a path. History is an active dialogue between the present and the past, a phrase Carr himself used to define history. History is a story that must keep answering to evidence.

At his home in England in 1982, Carr passed into history at the age of 90.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 1 month ago.

3.

Philosophy Quote.

“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.”.

  • Thomas Aquinas.
  • circa 1265.

Saint Augustine, born in 354, is widely cited as the author of Christian Just War Theory. This area of thought takes a look at situational ethics and tries to add temperance. Augustine looked at a violent world and refused the fantasy that moral people could always stay clean. He did not hand us a checklist. He handed us the wound. He made the tradition wrestle with a brutal question: if peace is the goal, what do we do when violence is already at the door? That is Augustine’s role in this story. He gave Just War thinking its grief, its caution, and its sense that even a necessary war is still a tragedy, not a triumph.

Many centuries later, around 1265, Thomas Aquinas clarifed his message: 

“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.”

Aquinas, born about 1225, gave us moral clarity to war based on situational ethics. His famous three necessary conditions are proper authority, just cause, and right intent. In plain English, war cannot just be somebody’s anger with weapons. It cannot be private revenge. It cannot be conquest dressed up as virtue. It must be in defense and answer a real wrong. It must be declared by the proper authority, and aim at restoring justice or peace rather than feeding corruption, greed, or bloodlust.

I picture Aquinas in stone halls and candlelight, huge in mind, methodical, patient, almost architectural in the way he thought. A Dominican friar in the 13th century, he was not trying to be flashy. He was trying to build a structure strong enough to hold truth without collapsing into chaos. He gathered scripture, reason, Aristotle, law, and theology, then laid them out like a builder laying blocks. Augustine gave the tradition its moral storm. Aquinas gave it columns, beams, and load-bearing walls.

From there, Just War thinking spread far beyond medieval Christianity. Its descendants helped shape the broader moral grammar of war across the world, especially through international humanitarian law. The basic idea is simple but powerful: even war has limits. You do not target civilians. You do not torture prisoners. You do not take hostages. You do not humiliate detainees. You do not use force without restraint. Those rules exist to prevent the worst kinds of war crimes: attacks on civilians, cruel treatment, torture, degrading treatment, unlawful execution, intimidation, and abuse of prisoners. So even when modern nations no longer speak in Augustine’s or Aquinas’s language, they still live in the shadow of the same ancient effort to put a moral leash on organized violence.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

4.

History Quote.

“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”.

  • David Hume.
  • 1748.

Hume’s quote from 1748 was not saying smart people believe nothing. He was not telling us to become frozen skeptics, afraid to trust anything. He was saying belief should be earned. Let confidence rise, but make it rise for a reason.

That is the science-first spirit. You do not commit first and defend later. You let evidence, logic, testing, and good authority do their work. Some ideas deserve strong belief. Some deserve light belief. Some deserve no belief yet. That is believing well: proportion your confidence to the support.

This idea later sharpened into a modern skeptical rule. Marcello Truzzi used the phrase

“extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,”

and Carl Sagan later gave the idea its most famous public form. The thread is clear: Hume gave us the calibration principle, Truzzi sharpened it for unusual claims, and Sagan carried it into modern science communication.

Truth is alignment with reality, and belief is confidence in that alignment. Calibration is the discipline of adjusting confidence to the kind and quality of support. Empirical claims answer to observation. Rational claims answer to logic. Speculative claims remain possible but unproven. Disproven claims should be released as truth. This is how secular spirituality stays honest: wonder remains open, but confidence must be earned.

 


That History Quote, 

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

5.

Philosophy Quote.

“Our statements about the…world face the tribunal of sense experience…as a corporate body.”.

  • W. V. Quine.
  • 1951.

People do not revise beliefs one at a time in a vacuum. They protect central beliefs, sacrifice peripheral ones, and reinterpret new evidence through a larger web. In 1951, Quine put it this way:

“Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as a corporate body.”

Quine’s point here is that beliefs usually hang together. A single claim about reality rarely walks into experience alone. It arrives with background assumptions, supporting ideas, and habits of thought already in place. That is why this quote connects so naturally to worldview. From Quine’s point of view, what we believe forms more like a web than a stack of separate bricks. Experience presses on the whole structure, and then we adjust different parts of it as needed.

Worldview is the deeper interpretive structure through which beliefs are sorted, integrated, defended, or revised. Where Quine gives us a web of belief, we can push further into the lived human side of that structure by framing worldview around personal language, philosophy, and religion. From within a larger framework, we decide what feels believable in the first place.

W. V. Quine became one of the major figures in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. He is especially known for his 1951 essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” where this quote appears and where he challenged the sharp divide between truths supposedly true by meaning alone and truths grounded in experience.

In the broader academic world, Quine matters because he helped reshape how philosophers think about meaning, evidence, and theory. His critique of reductionism and his more holistic picture of belief became part of the backbone of later debates in epistemology, philosophy of science, and analytic philosophy more broadly.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

The end.

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