Category: Thought

Virtue is the health of the soul.

Ariston of Chios, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, fragment 359.

Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Declaration of Rights (1812).

One does not humanize carnage, one condemns it, because one humanizes oneself.

The feeling of reverence should itself be treated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with which alone, in the end, reverence is compatible.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 3: Reason in Religion (1905).

Mind Your Business

Motto on obverse of the Fugio cent, designed by Benjamin Franklin, and minted in 1787.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

George Washington, in a letter to James Madison (March 2, 1488).

You guys can have it. Like, we’re ’ceding it to you people, OK? You social justice, lefty, Marxist, communist freaks: you can have California. Have it with all your diversity; and have it with all of your nonsense. And you will destroy it, but have it — but you can’t have what we want, too. Pick one. All right? So you can have it. I’m letting it go. I’m letting you go, Cali, and I ain’t coming back.

Dave Rubin, “DeSantis Calls BS on Blue State Mandates & Moving to Florida AMA | Direct Message,” signing off from The Rubin Report’s last public livestream from California. Mr. Rubin is moving lock, stock, and barrel to Florida. (Note: the apostrophe before “ceding” marks where we have redacted his spoken “con” — Dave obviously did not mean “conceding.”)

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

The character Nelly Dean, in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Edmund Burke, Letter to M. de Menonville (October 1789).

Virtue is not always amiable. Integrity is sometimes ruined by prejudices and by passions.

John Adams, diary (February 9, 1779).