Category: Thought

Sometime ideas, like men, jump up and say ‘hello.’ They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely. All that we see in this world is based on someone’s ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream.

Log Lady (played by Margaret Lanterman, née Coulson), in “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer” (Twin Peaks, Episode Two), written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, premiering April 19, 1990 (ABC).

Un bon mot ne prouve rien.

A witty saying proves nothing.

Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien.

“Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.”

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1592).

The civil state regarded purely as a lawful state, is based on the following a priori principles:

• The freedom of every member of society as a human being.
• The equality of each with all the others as a subject.
• The independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen.

These principles are not so much laws given by an already established state, as laws by which a state can alone be established in accordance with pure rational principles of external human right.

Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice (1791).

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (September 24, 1717 – March 2, 1797), author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), Letter to Anne, Countess of Ossory (August 16, 1776).

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Philip K. Dick, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978).

I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were about upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew they were exceedingly poor, and I had been accustomed to regard their poverty as the necessary consequence of their being non-slaveholders. I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement. And upon coming to the north, I expected to meet with a rough, hard-handed, and uncultivated population, living in the most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing of the ease, luxury, pomp, and grandeur of southern slaveholders. Such being my conjectures, any one acquainted with the appearance of New Bedford may very readily infer how palpably I must have seen my mistake.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845.