Category: Thought

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Francis Bacon, Essex’s Device (1595).

The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, as quoted in Antoine Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (trans. Robert Kerr, 1790), Preface, p. xiv.

It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. . . . If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versa.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement (1776), as quoted in Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 5.

[F]airly stated, “Say’s law of markets” survives as the most fundamental “economic law” in all economic theory. It enunciates the principle that “demands in general” are “supplies in general” — different aspects of one phenomenon.

W.H. Hutt, A Rehabilitation of Say’s Law (1974), p. 3.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

George Santayana, as quoted in Jon Winokur’s compilation, The Portable Curmudgeon (1987).

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Delmore Schwartz, as quoted in Jon Winokur’s collection of aphorisms, The Portable Curmudgeon (1987).

Of all the noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

Samuel Johnson, as quoted in Jon Winokur’s compilation of aphorisms, The Quotable Curmudgeon (1987).

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

George Santayana, as quoted in Jon Winokur’s compilation, The Portable Curmudgeon (1987).

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.

Wilson Mizner, as quoted by Jon Winokur, ed., The Portable Curmudgeon (1987).

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. One curious thing about the document is its promise of compensation:

And the executive will in due time recommend that all citizens of the United States who shall have remained loyal thereto throughout the rebellion, shall (upon the restoration of the constitutional relation between the United States, and their respective States, and people, if that relation shall have been suspended or disturbed) be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.

The proclamation was signed by Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward:

Done at the City of Washington this twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-two, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.

The final version of the proclamation was delivered on January 1, 1863.