Category: Thought

Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade. 

R.A. Lafferty, The Flame Is Green (1971).

Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that.

R.A. Lafferty, The Flame Is Green (1971).

It seems impossible, but there it is.

Kenneth Arnold, quoted in the Chicago Times (July 7, 1947), characterizing the nine UFOs “flying at incredible speed” that he had seen on June 24. He said a man he had met reported seeing something similar over Ukiah, Oregon.

Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

Kenneth Rexroth, “Tolstoy: War and Peace,” Classics Revisited (1968).

‎Sometimes traveling people will be talking together. They will say how good it is in some places and how bad it is in others. And, sooner or later, one of them is bound to mention it. “Talk about really being out in the boondocks!” he will say, “there’s a little planet named Earth —”

R.A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968).

How’s this for a randomized controlled trial: Out of the 189 hospital ivermectin cases Ralph [Lorigo] took on, eighty went to court. Of those, Ralph’s team won forty and lost forty. Out of the forty cases they lost, thirty-nine patients died (97.5 percent). Out of the forty cases they won, only two died (5 percent). Even more specifically, Ralph went to court six times on behalf of patients hospitalized at Rochester Medical Center. In the three cases he won, all survived. In the three cases he lost, all three died. Of all the infuriating injustice I have witnessed in Covid, this one puts me over the edge.

Pierre Kory with Jenna McCarthy, War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic (2024), Chapter Thirty-six: “A Legal Legend.”

The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market . . . the higher the black market price.

Kenneth E. Boulding, “A Note on the Theory of the Underground economy,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (1947), Vol. 13 no.1, p. 117

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter X.

They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.

Kenneth Arnold to East Oregonian reporter Bill Bequette at the airport at Pendleton on June 25, 1947, where Arnold was refueling his private plane. Bill Bequette and editor Nolan Skiff’s front page story in the evening paper of the same day, titled “Impossible! Maybe, But Seein’ Is Believin’, Says Flyer,” started the modern Flying Saucer legend, which was widely reported and discussed worldwide in the 1950s.