Category: Thought

These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man lord.

Flavius Josephus on the Galilean, or “fourth sect of Jewish philosophy,” Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, Chapter One.

Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside.

George Santayana, ”The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” Winds of Doctrine (1913).

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (June 1850; Dean Russell, trans., 1950).

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000; 2016).

I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians (1857-1859).

No paper with a past like the Gray Lady’s can be trusted to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to identify “fake news.”

Mark Crispin Miller, foreword to Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History (2021).

I’m sick of hearing about China and ‘their’ censorship. OK? Our censorship is China’s censorship now. Dragonfly and Google were the same thing. I warned you then. It’s over.

Jason Bermas, “Is This the End of Joe Rogan at Spotify?” on Rokfin (February 5, 2022).

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Part Two: “Metaphysics of Virtue.”

Image incorporating aquatint silhouette by J.T. Puttrich, 1793. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

Olympic corporate sponsors are sportwashing genocide. The Beijing Games are a referendum on the Chinese government’s atrocities. Do you ignore the ongoing genocide, or do you take a stand?

Omer Kanat, Executive Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, as quoted on Senator Rick Scott’s website, “Communist China Cannot Whitewash Genocide with Olympic Games” (January 24, 2022).

Nobody cares about it. Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay? . . . I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay? . . . And I think a lot of people believe that, and I’m sorry if that’s a hard truth to hear, but every time I say that I care about the Uyghurs, I’m really just lying if I don’t really care. And so, I’d rather not lie to you and tell you the truth — it’s not a priority for me.

Chamath Palihapitiya, a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American billionaire venture capitalist, quoted in “Investor’s Uyghur Comments Are Even Worse Than You’ve Heard,” by Jim Geraghty, National Review (January 18, 2022).