"The state arises, Socrates explains, "out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants." Division of labor then … - Daniel J. Boorstin

Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know. The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading.

"Despite Acton's optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as "one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces." "Nationality," newly flourishing in Europe in Acton's day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. "The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality....Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational....The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom." And the State (as in Bismarck's Prussia)-the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism-was "a vast abstraction above all other things" (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives."

There is no cure for illusion. There is only the opportunity for discovery.