Category: Thought

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Clive Staples Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another . . . has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. . . . makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.

Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93.

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942).

In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth.

Gordon R. Dickson, No Room for Man (Manor Books, 1974 — from which the image above was taken), originally titled Necromancer and published in 1962.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

Consider your origin;
you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXVI, lines 118–120.

The lessons of history:

1. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
2. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Charles A. Beard’s response, upon being asked to summarize the lessons of history, saying he could do it in four key points; as quoted in “Condensed History Lesson” by Arthur H. Secord, in Readers’ Digest, Vol. 38, No. 226 (February 1941), p. 20.

Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.

Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).

Justice is indiscriminately due to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, Georgia v. Brailsford (1794).

The art of politics is ostentatious giving and surreptitious taking.

Roger J. Vaughan, quoted in Stephen Labaton, “Presidential Candidates Ignore Banking Problem,” New York Times, October 7, 1992.