Category: Thought

Simpliciter pateat vitium fortasse pusillum:
Quod tegitur, magnum creditur esse malum

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.

Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrammata (80–104 A.D.).

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

Henry David Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” The Dial (1842).

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

William S. Burroughs, “My Own Business,” in ‪The Adding Machine: Selected Essays‬‎ (1985), p. 16.

Wer sich aber zum Wurm macht, kann nachher nicht klagen,
dass er mit Füßen getreten wird.

However, he who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards that he gets stepped on.

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Part two: Metaphysical Principles of Virtue page 98.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (1844), ”Politics.”

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

William S. Burroughs, Grand Street, no. 37 & The War Universe (1992).

The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (1844), ”Politics.”

Thomas Jefferson still survives.

John Adams, final words, July 4, 1826. Jefferson had died a few hours earlier.

Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.

René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth (1938), Vol. 2, Essais et Notes.