Defunding the police? Yes, that’s a bad idea. But so is de-policing the funds.
Bill Maher, “New Rule: American Kleptocracy,” on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, railing against the bipartisan misdistribution of COVID crisis “stimulus.”
Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1595), Book II, Ch. 12: “Apology for Raimond Sebond.”
The dictator does not consider his power firmly established until he has reached the point where there is no man under him who is of any worth.
Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie (1953; In Praise of Philosophy, 1963), p. 5.
The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book VIII.
Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie (1953; In Praise of Philosophy, 1963), p. 59.
The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I.
Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process…
The history of literature is the history of the human mind.
William H. Prescott, “Chateaubriand’s English Literature” in Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (1845), p. 245.