Category: Thought

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. 

Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

Every cause produces more than one effect.

Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” The Westminster Review (April 1857).

There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.

Joseph Addison, The Guardian (1713).

We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.

Alfred Hitchcock, in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1965).

Whoever voluntarily undertakes the necessary office of rearing and educating, obtains the parental power without generation.

Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Book III, Ch. II, § II.

I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.

Alfred Hitchcock, as quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1985) by François Truffaut, p. 109.

Ideas are more important than battles.

The Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner, as quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Friedrich von Schlegel, “Selected Aphorisms from The Athenæum” (80), from Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 1797–1800, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (1968), translators.

Equality of rights is the first of rights.

Personal motto of Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance” in Collected Essays (1959).