Category: Thought

Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.

With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,

[signed] A. Einstein

Albert Einstein, letter to Marie Curie (November 23, 1911).

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

Aaron Burr, quoted in Burton Stevenson, Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases (1948).

Fortunately for all of us, the Cold War ended not with a bang but with a whimper. It is surprising, however, that its cessation inspired so little elation.

First two sentences from the introduction to Paul Anthony Rahe’s Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville & The Modern Prospect (2009).

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., address to a joint session of Congress (August 12, 1974).

The word “listen” contains the
same letters as the word “silent.”

The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), Canto III.

Usually, so far as improvement in the people’s economic conditions is concerned, humanitarians simply play the role of the busybody.

Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1927, Ann S. Schwier, trans., 1971), p. 301.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.

Clive Staples Lewis, “Equality,” The Spectator, Vol. CLXXI (August 27, 1943).

Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.

Winston Churchill, as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), p. 535.

Society is not homogeneous, and those who do not deliberately close their eyes have to recognize that men differ greatly from one another from the physical, moral, and intellectual viewpoints.

Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1927, Ann S. Schwier, trans., 1971), p. 281.