Category: Thought

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Orson Welles, in the published screenplay for The Big Brass Ring (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Teresa Press, 1987).

When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go,
nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

Walt Whitman, To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire (1856;1881).

The only people who object to escapism are jailers.

C. S. Lewis, as quoted by Arthur C. Clarke, God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988).

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Jerry Pournelle, at jerrypournelle.com.

The foremost, or indeed the sole, condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), as quoted in Robert Nisbet, The New Despotism (1976).

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

Jerry Pournelle & Larry Niven, Lucifer’s Hammer (1985).

Life is the true mystery, not because impenetrable by thought, but because thought penetrates it to the infinite with power equal to its own.

Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic (1913; 1967), Douglas Ainslie, trans., p. 590.

They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.

Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (1641).

The fact is: almost everything is funny. You just have to have a way of looking at it.