Category: Thought

Signe de décadence: humanitaires, mièvre sensiblerie;
rend incapable défendre positions. Toute élite qui n’est
pas prête à livrer bataille pour défendre ses positions
est condamnée à disparaître, et il y a une élite
nouvelle qui monte et qui pousse l’ancienne.

Sign of decadence: humanitarians, mawkish sentimentality; makes one incapable of defending positions. Any elite that is not ready to do battle to defend its positions is condemned to disappear, and there is a new elite that rises and pushes out the old.

Vilfredo Pareto, Les systèmes socialistes (1902-1903), Vol. I, p. 37-38, David M. Hart, translator.

Well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something . . . in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem . . . seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned.

Kenneth Arnold, 30 years after first seeing nine mysterious flying objects over Mount Rainier, while attending the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, curated by Fate to mark the 30th anniversary of the “birth” of the modern UFO age, “Pilot Kenneth Arnold 1977 still angry about disbelief,” on YouTube.

Almost every organization . . . exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.

Kenneth Boulding, Joseph T. Mahoney & Anne S. Huff, Toward a New Social Contract. Theory in Organization Science (Faculty paper, University of Illinois at Urbana, 1993).

Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.

Kenneth Boulding, quoted in Leonard Silk, The Economists (1976).

Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade. 

R.A. Lafferty, The Flame Is Green (1971).

Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that.

R.A. Lafferty, The Flame Is Green (1971).

It seems impossible, but there it is.

Kenneth Arnold, quoted in the Chicago Times (July 7, 1947), characterizing the nine UFOs “flying at incredible speed” that he had seen on June 24. He said a man he had met reported seeing something similar over Ukiah, Oregon.

Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

Kenneth Rexroth, “Tolstoy: War and Peace,” Classics Revisited (1968).

‎Sometimes traveling people will be talking together. They will say how good it is in some places and how bad it is in others. And, sooner or later, one of them is bound to mention it. “Talk about really being out in the boondocks!” he will say, “there’s a little planet named Earth —”

R.A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968).