Category: Thought

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

Publius Tacitus, Agricola (98 A.D.), Chapter 42.

Force shites upon Reason’s Back.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736).

I don’t regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.

Orson Welles, in an interview with Bernie Braden in Paris (1960).

We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.

Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1965).

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

Orson Welles, in an interview from Hollywood Voices (1971), Andrew Sarris, editor.

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.