The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and errors very real. But in the end, let’s not forget that we are the only ones to have the possibility of improvement and emancipation that lies in free genius.
Albert Camus, as quoted in Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought, Fred H. Willhoite, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968).
Todo o homem que merece ser célebre sabe que não vale a pena sê-lo.
Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.
Fernando Pessoa, A Celebridade (1915).
And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood.
Albert Camus, from Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1960).
A essência do universo é a contradição.
Contradiction is the essence of the universe.
Fernando Pessoa, “A Nova Poesia Portuguesa no Seu Aspecto Psicológico,” A Águia, Porto (September 1912).
It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, (1905), p. 82.
People who get eyeball arthritis see only what they’re supposed to see, like that TV screen.
Gene Wolfe, in ”Hunter Lake,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2003; reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Starwater Strains (2005).
It has been said that youngsters go to jail to learn crime as others go to college to learn who won the Peloponnesian wars and the names of the generals, and how to play football.
It’s true. All penitentiaries are crime schools for the young with brilliant professors, empirical professors, doing the pitching. How any criminal could go to such a school and fail to come out a better criminal, I cannot imagine — because the teaching and the ideas are brilliant, even if in most cases the premise stinks, as in paranoia.
It would be hard for a you gster to see wherein the premise is faulty. A class in just this in the educational department would be a very good idea.
For instance, one thing youngsters are taught by old cons is that it is vaguely wrong to steal from individuals; but that to heist a corporation is the acme of Robinhoodesque virtue. It does not occur to the youngsters that corporations are composed of individuals. . . .
Jack Woodford, on prison life in his personal report on his short time incarcerated, Home Away From Home (1962), p. 194.
George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (1916), Chapter XVI, “Egotism in Practice.”
All philosophies have the common property of being speculative, and, therefore, their immediate influence on those who hold them is in many ways alike, however opposed the theories may be to one another: they all make people theoretical. In this sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality, it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation, accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and makes the sorry escapades of human nature from convention seem even more ignominious than its ruling prejudices.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862).
As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death — which sort was the best. “That,” said he, “which is unexpected.”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 – 120) quoting Gaius Julius Caesar, Roman Apophthegms.