Category: Thought

It is the logic of our times, 
No subject for immortal verse — 
That we who lived by honest dreams 
Defend the bad against the worse.

Cecil Day-Lewis, Where are the War Poets? (1943).

Il faut toujours en fait de nouvelles attendre
le sacrement de la confirmation.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, Letter to Charles-Augustin Ferriol, comte d’Argental (August, 28, 1760).

If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.

Letter to Adlai Stevenson (November 5, 1959), quoted in The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer : A Biography(1984), by Jackson J. Benson, p. 876.

La superstition met le monde entier en flammes;
la philosophie les éteint.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1822), “Superstition.”

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini.

Calumnies are answered best with silence.

Ben Jonson, Volpone (1606), Act II, scene ii.

The push for a biologically sexless society is an arrogant utopian vision that cuts us off from our evolutionary history, promotes the delusion that humans are not animals, and undercuts respecting each individual for their unique individuality. Sex is neither simply a matter of socialization, nor a personal choice. 

Robert Lynch, “From Sex To Gender: The Modern Dismissal of Biology,” Skeptic (April 7, 2023).

The demand for money is regulated entirely by its value, and its value by its quantity.

Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Egalitarianism and the Elites,” The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 8, No. 2 (Summer 1995).

The grave will fall in upon him who digs it.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.