Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a ‘chorus of worlds’ just like ours. – Matthew Stewart
George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn’t really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society. – Matthew Stewart
Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client’s rank and file. – Matthew Stewart
I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy – nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. – Matthew Stewart
Most religions assume that you find purpose through some agent that sits above or outside the world and imbues it with purpose. – Matthew Stewart
I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans. I spent one particularly haunting year advising bankers in Mexico. – Matthew Stewart
Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising. – Matthew Stewart
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. – Matthew Stewart
In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on. – Matthew Stewart
We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school. – Matthew Stewart
America’s revolutionary deists saw themselves as – and they were – participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world. – Matthew Stewart
Nature’s God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion. – Matthew Stewart
I’d like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation – more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education. – Matthew Stewart
It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of ‘Nietzsche and German Idealism.’ – Matthew Stewart
Ethan Allen was convinced that every planet out there has its own intelligent extraterrestrials. And this, as you can imagine, is a radical, inspiring, but very unsettling, idea. – Matthew Stewart
What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree. – Matthew Stewart
Most management systems have to do with establishing trust and getting people to cooperate. They’re not really about expertise or science. – Matthew Stewart
Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science. – Matthew Stewart
In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they’re helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent. – Matthew Stewart
One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results. – Matthew Stewart
At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it. – Matthew Stewart
The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word ‘God’ appears, it’s obviously our God, it’s obviously a Christian God; it’s usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I’m making is: That is just absolutely not true. – Matthew Stewart
For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness. – Matthew Stewart
It’s wrong to look at what we call ‘Enlightenment values’ as some fad of the 18th century. It’s deeply rooted in ancient history. – Matthew Stewart
