Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.
Kenneth Rexroth, “Tolstoy: War and Peace,” Classics Revisited (1968).
Sometimes traveling people will be talking together. They will say how good it is in some places and how bad it is in others. And, sooner or later, one of them is bound to mention it. “Talk about really being out in the boondocks!” he will say, “there’s a little planet named Earth —”
R.A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968).
How’s this for a randomized controlled trial: Out of the 189 hospital ivermectin cases Ralph [Lorigo] took on, eighty went to court. Of those, Ralph’s team won forty and lost forty. Out of the forty cases they lost, thirty-nine patients died (97.5 percent). Out of the forty cases they won, only two died (5 percent). Even more specifically, Ralph went to court six times on behalf of patients hospitalized at Rochester Medical Center. In the three cases he won, all survived. In the three cases he lost, all three died. Of all the infuriating injustice I have witnessed in Covid, this one puts me over the edge.
Pierre Kory with Jenna McCarthy, War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic (2024), Chapter Thirty-six: “A Legal Legend.”
The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market . . . the higher the black market price.
Kenneth E. Boulding, “A Note on the Theory of the Underground economy,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (1947), Vol. 13 no.1, p. 117
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter X.
They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.
Kenneth Arnold to East Oregonian reporter Bill Bequette at the airport at Pendleton on June 25, 1947, where Arnold was refueling his private plane. Bill Bequette and editor Nolan Skiff’s front page story in the evening paper of the same day, titled “Impossible! Maybe, But Seein’ Is Believin’, Says Flyer,” started the modern Flying Saucer legend, which was widely reported and discussed worldwide in the 1950s.
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill, speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943, in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999), p. 215.
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveler (1824), Preface, p. 7.
Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
Edgar Allan Poe, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. IV: The Raven Edition.
Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature.
Washington Irving, “The Mutabilities of Literature” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-20).