Category: Thought

Apparently, “conspiracy stuff” is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Gore Vidal, “The Enemy Within,” The Observer (October 27, 2002).

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance” in Collected Essays (1959).

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Graham Greene to critic Stephen Pile, The Sunday Times (London, January 18, 1981).

We will share with you the most up-to-date information daily. You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust the Director-General of Health and the Ministry of Health for their information. Do feel free to visit it anytime to clarify any rumor you may hear. COVID19.govt.nz. Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth. 

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, March 19, 2020, see “Did New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern Once Say, ‘Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth’?”, Snopes.com.

Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.

Karl Kraus, as quoted in Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1976) as translated by Harry Zohn.

The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.

Gore Vidal, Julian (1964).

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

Karl Kraus, as quoted in Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1976) as translated by Harry Zohn.

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.