Category: Thought

Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.

Outlets like Time magazine tell us eating bugs is the solution to all of your problems, and, you know, the people telling you to do it aren’t doing it themselves, as always, but they want you to eat bugs. That’s why recently I’ve come to the realization of something: It’s not enough to not eat bugs; you have to be anti-bug-eating. And that requires action against the bug-eating movement — “Big Bug.” The best way to do this is to eat more meat.

Matt Walsh, on his podcast touting a sponsor, GoodRanchers.com/WALSH.

The one thing that the master craftsman envies in the apprentice is his fire.

H.L. Gold, The Fifth Galaxy Reader (1961), p. xi.

I deny that villany is ever necessary. It is impossible that it should ever be necessary for any reasonable creature to violate all the laws of justice, mercy, and truth. No circumstances can make it necessary for a man to burst in sunder all the ties of humanity. It can never be necessary for a rational being to sink himself below a brute. A man can be under no necessity of degrading himself into a wolf. The absurdity of the supposition is so glaring, that one would wonder any one can help seeing it.

John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774).

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason. It is our part, by religion and reason joined, to counteract them all we can.

John Wesley, Letter to John Benson (October 5, 1770); published in Wesley’s Select Letters (1837), p. 207.

[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense (1905).

Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy.  To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly.

Mary Ann Evans writing as George Eliot, in The Essays of George Eliot (1883), “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” (January 1868) — signed by the hero of her 1866 social novel Felix Holt, The Radical.

He’s a Fool that makes his Doctor his Heir.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733).

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896).

Make yourself known as a philosopher, that is a free man.