Sic tempora verti
cernimus atque illas adsumere robora gentes,
concidere has.
Times are upset, we see, and nations rise
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), The Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 420–422 (trans. A. D. Melville).
To strength and greatness, others fail and fall.
Fas est et ab hoste doceri.
We can learn even from our enemies.
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), The Metamorphoses, Book IV, 428.
Ut ameris, amabilis esto.
If you want to be loved, be lovable.
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), The Art of Love, Book II, line 107.
There is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency.
Robert A. Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon (1951), p. 100.
Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics—not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works.
Robert A. Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children (1941; 1958).
Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime — that is, the design to injure the person or property of another — is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.
. . . bloße Erfahrung ist keine Wissenschaft.
Experience by itself is not science.
Edmund Husserl, Pure Phenomenology: Its Method and Its Field of Investigation; Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (May 3, 1917); Die reine Phänomenologie, ihr Forschungsgebiet und ihre Methode.
When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.
James Whitcomb Riley, as quoted in Exploring Indiana Highways: Trip Trivia (2007), by Michael Heim.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987).
You can say that not every fish in shark-infested waters is a shark. That doesn’t mean that it’s safe to swim in shark-infested waters.
Charles Upton, in conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove (March 27, 2022).
Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; 1st, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and 2ndly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.
Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Legislation (1830), Ch. X: “Analysis of Political Good and Evil; How they are spread in society.”