Category: Thought

For those of you who still think that we’ve gotten little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets. This idea of conspiracy theories — if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you . . . I promise you some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend to impress her. There would be leaks.

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, in conversation with Stephen Colbert, CBS (May 5, 2026).

Science is all about taking a look at the consensus and poking a hole in it and testing it and going, “I’m not quite sure of that.”

Ron Johnson, M.D., in an April 23, 2026, interview in The Epoch Times.

The constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (German: 1873; 1896), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (1999), translated by Ronald Speirs.

Non è mai alcuna cosa sì disperata, che non
vi sia qualche via da poterne sperare.

No circumstance is ever so desperate that one cannot nurture some spark of hope.

Niccolò Machiavelli, from The Mandrake (A.D. 1524), Act I, scene 1

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.

Polybius, The Histories, Book XVIII, Chapter 43.

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium,
atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Publius Tacitus, De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae (A.D. 98), Chapter 30, conclusion.

Comincionsi le guerre quando altri vuole,
ma non quando altri vuole si finiscono

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.

Niccolò Machiavelli, from the Florentine Histories — Istorie fiorentine (A.D. 1526).

The only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.

Polybius, as in The Histories of Polybius, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (1889), Book I, Chapter 1.

It is enough to ask somebody for his weapons without saying ‘I want to kill you with them,’ because when you have his weapons in hand, you can satisfy your desire.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (A.D. 1517), Book 1, Ch 44 (as translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella).

Apparently, “conspiracy stuff” is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Gore Vidal, “The Enemy Within,” The Observer (October 27, 2002).