Category: Thought

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Samuel Butler, Notebooks (1951).

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

The first formulation of “the pragmatic maxim,” by C.S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly, v. 12 (January 1878), pp. 286-302.

One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don’t remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.

C.S. Peirce, “Pragmatism and Pragmaticism” (1903).

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler, Speech at the Somerville Club, February 27, 1895.

The moral responsibility of the American humorist is the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, and the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence. Thus, the humorist is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles, and is the natural friend of human rights and liberties.

Mark Twain, quoted in Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull, 120.

The governmentalization of charity affects not just the donor but also the recipient. What was once asked as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement. The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, September 6, 2013, at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas.

There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

Charles Sanders Peirce, Lectures on Pragmatism delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (March 26 – May 17, 1903).

A thing must either exist or not exist — must have a certain attribute or not have it: there is no third possibility. This is a postulate of all thought; and in so far as it is alleged of phenomenal existence, no one calls it in question.

Herbert Spencer, ”Mill versus Hamilton — The Test of Truth,” The Fortnightly Review (July 1865).

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.

Charles Sanders Peirce, The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler, p. 49.