Category: Thought

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1925).

They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority.

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (June 1850; Dean Russell, trans., 1950).

In the best schools, almost all school time is wasted. Now and then something is learned that sticks fast; for the rest the boys are merely given time to grow and are kept from too much mischief.

George Santayana, Persons and Places (1944).

These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man lord.

Flavius Josephus on the Galilean, or “fourth sect of Jewish philosophy,” Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, Chapter One.

Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside.

George Santayana, ”The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” Winds of Doctrine (1913).

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (June 1850; Dean Russell, trans., 1950).

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000; 2016).

I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians (1857-1859).

No paper with a past like the Gray Lady’s can be trusted to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to identify “fake news.”

Mark Crispin Miller, foreword to Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History (2021).

I’m sick of hearing about China and ‘their’ censorship. OK? Our censorship is China’s censorship now. Dragonfly and Google were the same thing. I warned you then. It’s over.

Jason Bermas, “Is This the End of Joe Rogan at Spotify?” on Rokfin (February 5, 2022).