Category: Thought

Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1795).

Sed neque tam facilis res ulla est, quin ea primum
difficilis magis ad credendum constet, itemque
nil adeo magnum neque tam mirabile quicquam,
quod non paulatim minuant mirarier omnes.

For no fact is so simple we believe it at first sight,
And there is nothing that exists so great or marvelous 
That over time mankind does not admire it less and less.

Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book II, lines 1026–1029 (tr. Stallings).

O tempora! O mores!

O the times! O the manners!

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Against Catiline (63 BC), first speech.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

Rubén Blades, in a conference at Harvard University reported by Anne Stewart, “Not everyone enthusiastic about the future of TV,” Bangor Daily News (February 18, 1993).

I would not want to be a politician. . . . If I was campaigning, and I go against my opponent and he started attacking my character, and I leap over the table and choke him unconscious, would that help my campaign?

Chuck Norris’s reply when asked if Walker the Texas Ranger could be president, in an interview by BarelyPolitical.com (December 5, 2007). Mr. Norris passed away on March 19.

Fas est et ab hoste doceri.

It is right to be taught by the enemy.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, 428.

There is true grandeur in an example of justice, in making the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down the prejudice, like Satan, under our feet.

Senator Charles Sumner, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume 4, p. 500.

Medio tutissimus ibis.

You will be safest in the middle.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, 137.

Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propa­ganda. He shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propa­gandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneu­ver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture, a constant exercise of the critical faculties, and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).

The price of justice is eternal publicity.

Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me, Second Series (1923), “Secret Trials.”