Category: Thought

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

H. L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936), p. 279.

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. 

Edward Osborne Wilson, as quoted in Harvard Magazine from a public discussion between Wilson and James Watson moderated by NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich, September 10, 2009.

Nothing belongs to the dead, because the dead don’t need anything. Only the living need to possess things. The living need food, water, shelter, clothes, family, money, land. But the dead, the dead have already been tended to. Once they’re put in the ground, they have all they need. They’re not selfish. I like the dead.

The character Colton Briggs, as played by Nicolas Cage in The Old Way (2023), written by Carl W. Lucas.

Plato did not believe any more in his republic than old Homer did in his gods.

Arsène Houssaye, Philosophers and Actresses (1886).

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, quoted from the 1847 edition.

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you’d have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1921).

Change without continuity can be anarchy. Change with continuity can mean progress. And continuity without change can mean no progress.

President Richard M. Nixon, remarks at the Supreme Court upon the swearing in of Supreme Court Justice Warren E. Burger (June 23, 1969).

One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.

Karel Čapek, Letters from England (1925).

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, quoted from the 1847 edition.

Seize all the joy you can that robs no other.

Arsène Houssaye, as quoted by James O’Donnell Bennett in When Good Fellows Get Together (1908), p. 109.