Category: Thought

Once liberated from ambition, a person has nothing to lose by being taken for a fool.

‪John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude (1933)‬, p. 57.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

William Butler Yeats, speech (June 7, 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Censorship of Films Bill.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, 
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

W.H. Auden, from Epigraph on a Tyrant (1939).

O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of conscientious organizing spinster
That the minute you see her you are aginster?
Why glitter thy spectables so ominously?
Why are thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?
Why art thou fifty per cent. martyr
And fifty-one per cent. Tartar?

Ogden Nash, beginning of “Kind of an Ode to Duty” (1935), collected in I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938).

Marxism never changes. You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.

Anonymous, in Sales Management (Chicago: Dartnell Corp., 1918-75), vol. 70 (Survey of Buying Power, 1953), p. 80.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

William Butler Yeats, letter to Ellen O’Leary (February 3, 1889).

i think pedophilee is the plural

Jeffrey Epstein, sans capitalization and quotation marks and period, responding to a March 20, 2012, email by one “izmo” [email address redacted] who had previously inquired where Epstein was (Epstein answered “Paris with woody allen”) and then quipped “les pedophile convention”? From the Epstein File disclosure, see Clara Molot, “The 10 Things That Haunt Me From the Latest Batch of Epstein Files,” Vanity Fair (February 3, 2026). By the way, we know who “izmo” is: Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s younger brother.

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Cormac McCarthy as quoted by Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” The New York Times (April 19, 1992).

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922).

Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (1998).