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.
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth (1938), Vol. 2, Essais et Notes.
In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn’t know.
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
Stupid ideas are immortal. Each new generation invents them anew.