Category: Thought

Melius est bene mori, quam male vivere . . . qui mortem metuit, amittit gaudia vitae; super omnia vincit veritas, vincit, qui occiditur, quia nulla ei nocet adversitas, si nulla ei dominatur iniquitas.

It is better to die well, than to live wrongly . . . who is afraid of death loses the joy of life; truth prevails all, prevails who is killed, because no adversity can harm him, who is not dominated by injustice.

Jan Hus, Letter to Christian of Prachatice, as quoted in John Huss: His Life, Teachings and Death, After Five Hundred Years (1915) by David Schley Schaff, p. 58. “Super omnia vincit veritas” (Truth Prevails All) was adopted as the motto by Hussite warriors, and centuries later this motto was inscribed on the banner of the Presidents of the Czechoslovakia and now (in Czech translation) is inscribed on the banner of the President of the Czech Republic.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1973

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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.

Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction (1978)

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs (2010), page 181. Several variants of this passage are being circulated widely on the Internet, usually misattributed to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, 
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast, 
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS, Don Juan, Canto XIV (1823).

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821).