Category: Thought

Medio tutissimus ibis.

You will be safest in the middle.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, 137.

Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propa­ganda. He shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propa­gandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneu­ver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture, a constant exercise of the critical faculties, and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).

The price of justice is eternal publicity.

Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me, Second Series (1923), “Secret Trials.”

No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

James Madison writing as Publius, The Federalist, No. 62 (1788).

On March 18, 1899, Phoebe, a satellite of Saturn, became the first moon to be discovered with photographs, taken in August 1898, by William Henry Pickering.

Also on the Eighteenth of March:

• The Sunflower Student Movement (2014)
• President Eisenhower signed a bill bringing Hawaii into the United States (1959)
• South Africans voted to get rid of the color bar (1992)

Journalists say a thing that they know isn’t true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

Arnold Bennett, The Title (1918).

[J]ust because men are in a group, and therefore weakened, receptive, and in a state of psychological regression, they pretend all the more to be “strong individuals.” The mass man is clearly sub-human, but pretends to be superman. He is more suggestible, but insists he is more forceful; he is more unstable, but thinks he is firm in his convictions. If one openly treats the mass as a mass, the individuals who form it will feel themselves belittled and will refuse to participate. If one treats these individuals as children (and they are children because they are in a group), they will not accept their leader’s projections or identify with him. They will withdraw and we will not be able to get anything out of them. On the contrary, each one must feel individualized, each must have the impression that he is being looked at, that he is being addressed personally. Only then will he respond and cease to be anonymous (although in reality remaining anonymous).

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968). This pronouncement is often attributed — with grave authority — to Will Durant alone, cited as from a 1946 Ladies Home Journal article, “What Is Civilization?” This appears to be incorrect: read the article, it’s excellent; but the apothegm is not to be found there.

Analysis is the beggar’s need to explain how riches come to be; whatever he doesn’t possess must have been acquired by swindle; the other merely has the fortune; he, fortunately, knows.

Karl Kraus, arguing against Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis of Michaelangelo, as quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon (1987), Jon Winokur, editor.

Nothing creates more awkwardness than saying things people can’t afford to admit they agree with. Disagreement is manageable. It’s agreement that wreaks havoc. If people disagree, they’ll debate you. If they secretly agree with something, but are furious with you for saying it, then they’ll try to shut you up by any means necessary. As Tom Stoppard puts it, ‘I agree with every word you say, but I will fight to the death against your right to say it.’

Joseph Sobran, “How I Was Fired by Bill Buckley,” Center for Libertarian Studies (1994).