Author: Redactor

The pioneers of rationalism inveighed against the traditional dogmas, ridiculed popular superstitions, campaigned against priests and sorcerers, and castigated them for fostering and preying upon the ignorance of the masses — hoping that a final victory of science would vanish for ever the evils of unreason and organized deception. Little did they suspect that a Trojan Horse would appear in the camp of enlightenment, full of streamlined sorcerers clad in the latest paraphernalia of science.

Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), p. 237-238.

Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them.

Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, 1938 (1941, Eng. translation).

O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?
Why art thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?
Why art thou fifty per cent martyr
And fifty-one per cent Tartar?

Ogden Nash, from “Kind of an Ode to Duty,” The Face Is Familiar (1941)

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it,

And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.

I don’t mind their having a lot of money, and I don’t care how they employ it,

But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.