Philosophy
Scott was a trained economist and former college professor (he had lost his position due to his socialist and pacifist beliefs, and his anti-war activism during World War I). He continued to tread the path of a social and political theorist. Helen had grown up in an economically comfortable family of Theosophists, and as a young woman had a romantic relationship with Jiddu Krishnamurti. She was trained as a musician, and also had some brief experience in the factory work world before moving into the agrarian life with Scott.
During the Vietnam War, the Nearings joined more than 400 other writers in signing a statement, published as a full page ad in the New York Post, declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the war.
Read more about this topic: Helen And Scott Nearing
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word “no.” To “no” there is only one answer and that is “yes.” Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)