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1 " Reality is all things simultaneously, or, in the Greek phrase, it is a process of “becoming” in which even apparently clearcut opposites lose identity and merge into each other. "
― Epicurus , The Philosophy of Epicurus
2 " every event whatsoever has a prior cause, whether known or not. "
3 " The Epicurean devil, of course, was (and is) popular religion with its massive ignorance and superstition. The Epicurean savior today would be the humanitarian scientist, who would tell us that cancer is not divinely sent but naturally caused, even though he does not yet know its precise cause. With the Epicureans it was never science for the sake of science but always science for the sake of human happiness. "
4 " the universe as a whole is eternal, although individual worlds within the system are born and die; and if the universe is eternal it must be self-sustaining and require no divine assistance for its maintenance. "
5 " Epicureanism was devised specifically as a “salvation” philosophy, a positive way of escape from a most unpleasant social and political environment. So it became imperative, in a positive sense, for the Epicureans to imitate the perfect serenity and self-sufficiency of their own idealized gods, who were actually a psychological projection of the kind of beings they themselves wanted to be. "
6 " sense data are what they are, and they are infallible, being mechanically transmitted to us by atomic images from the outer world. They may be overlaid with misleading interpretations and lead to “false opinions,” 39 but they are true if confirmed by close inspection or if they are not contradicted. "
7 " If man is nothing but a material mechanism and part of the world mechanism, then his choices of good and evil are mechanically determined, and he cannot be said to be an autonomous and responsible ethical being. Thus if materialism is to save moral responsibility and at the same time save determinism, it must represent man as partially determined (in his organic functions) and partially free (in his ethical capacity). "
