Category: Thought

There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Dorothy Parker, interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture (1970).

Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.

John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), as quoted in John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).

Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.

John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).

This passage was used as an epigraph by John Abramson in his book Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It (2022).

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).

It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.

Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 105.

Political liberty . . . has not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties.

John Morley, Voltaire (London: Macmillan and Company, 1885; 1897), p. 80.

No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen. From 1789 to 1812 Congress passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. In all these, freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage.

James Abram Garfield, speech at Ravenna, Ohio (July 4, 1865).

It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double-tongues.

“Ten Bears” in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as performed by Will Sampson and written by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, based on the novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales by Forest Carter.

Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.

Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 21.