Vanity is the soil that rulers spring from, as the mushrooms spring from the rich loam of our dark caverns. They pretend that it is the exercise of power that they are so fond of. Believe them not. It is the gratification of their vanity and nothing else.
Ingersoll Lockwood, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey (1889).
The general limits of your freedom are merely these: that you do not trespass upon the equal rights of others.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, remarks to the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (April 22, 1954).
Whoever undertakes to rule the kingdom and to shape it according to his whim — I foresee that he will fail to reach his goal. That is all.The kingdom is a living being. It cannot be constructed, in truth! He who tries to manipulate it will spoil it, he who tries to put it under his power will lose it.
Therefore: Some creatures go out in front, others follow, some have warm breath, others cold, some are strong, some weak, some attain abundance, other succumb.
The wise man will accordingly forswear excess, he will avoid arrogance and not overreach.
Lao Tzu, as quoted in the second of the Six Pamphlets of the “White Rose” Students.
In reality, dangerous temperatures — which overwhelmingly come from too much cold, not too much heat — are a smaller danger than ever thanks to two forces: fossil-fueled climate mastery and modestly warming temperatures. Contrary to the portrayal of the unimpacted global climate system as a delicate nurturer that will be ruined by a few degrees of warming, most climates have a dynamic range of often-dangerous temperatures — which are largely more dangerous at the cold end than at the warm end.
Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less (2022).
They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.
Gerald Massey, “A Retort,” from Gerald Massey’s Lectures (c.1900).
A sane being wished for peace and serenity, not to be the mortar in which the ingredients of destiny are finely ground.
David Brin, The Uplift War (1987).