Category: Thought

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements.

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”

Czy jeżeli ludożerca je widelcem i nożem to postęp?

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?

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

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana, “Why I Am Not a Marxist,” The Modern Monthly, Volume 9, Number 2 (April 1935).

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (Myśli nieuczesane, 1957; Jacek Galazka, translator, 1962).

I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it), and carry it on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even though the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this country.

Mark Twain, Territorial Enterprise, April 7, 1868.

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

Joseph Campbell, quoted in Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, Viral: The Search for the Origins of COVID-19 (2021) as the epigraph to the first chapter.

When everything has to be right, something isn’t.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (Myśli nieuczesane, 1957; Jacek Galazka, translator, 1962).

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote.

Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (2014).

It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

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.