It is rare to find the ideal of the patrician standing alone, not joining hands, albeit unavoidably and sometimes most reluctantly, with the ideals o… - R. W. K. Paterson

Plebeians have in every period been treated as mere means, Their mute part is that of serfs, cannon-fodder, wage-slaves, ‘hands’, political tools as mobs or ‘votes’, economic puppets as potential consumers, purchasers, o borrowers. … The double irony is that those who have exploited and manipulated them have typically been no less plebeian of soul. … If their ends have been of the same kind as those of their victims or subjects their human reality has been the same. The greater scale off their activity makes not the slightest difference. Multiply zero by the greatest of numbers and the results is still zero.

The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values. … It is therefore possible for a learned man, who has conscientiously acquired a vast, carefully organized, and scrupulously representative mass of historical, sociological, and psychological knowledge, to be nevertheless disastrously wrong about its human meaning.

The question of whether an ideal has frequently, or ever, been acted upon by men is totally irrelevant. The only relevant question is whether a proposed ideal is one which ought to be acted upon, one which legitimately claims a place in our souls, whether or not we do in fact admit it into our souls and try to live up to it. Justice is not metamorphosed into injustice because there are men who habitually act unjustly. A moral claim, if authentic, does not lapse merely because it is denied, however widely and flagrantly. On the contrary, the very nature of a value implies the possibility that men may fail to comply with it, since a ‘value’ which had legitimacy only if men accepted it but was automatically nullified whenever rejected it could not properly be said to constitute a value at all, that is, something which distinctively seeks to guide and direct our motives and conduct and not just passively reflect what we are already doing or have decided to do. The nature of values is to command or entreat us, to alter and redress our character, not just superfluously to describe it as it already anyway is.