Category: Thought

A grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharg’d.

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IV, line 55.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), as quoted in “Totalitarianism and the Five Stages of Dehumanization,” by Christiaan W.J.M. Alting von Geusau, Brownstone Institute (November 17, 2021).

Politics: a Trojan horse race.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts [Myśli nieuczesane] (1957) as translated by Jacek Galazka (1962).

Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), as quoted in “Totalitarianism and the Five Stages of Dehumanization,” by Christiaan W.J.M. Alting von Geusau, Brownstone Institute (November 17, 2021).

All of our separate fictions add up to joint reality.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts [Myśli nieuczesane] (1957) as translated by Jacek Galazka (1962).