Category: Thought

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.

[T]o destroy an error is to build up the truth that stands opposed to it.

What characterizes capitalism is not the bad taste of the crowds, but the fact that these crowds, made prosperous by capitalism, became consumers of literature — of course, of trashy literature. The book market is flooded by a downpour of trivial fiction for the semibarbarians. But this does not prevent great authors from creating imperishable works.

Among the new arrangements that feeble mortals are invited to make trial of, there is one that is presented to us in terms worthy of attention. Its formula is: Association, voluntary and progressive.

Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect imagination and a flattering fancy.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).