Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947; 1997 edition), p. 120.
Law is a thing which is insensible, and inexorable, more beneficial and more profitious to the weak than to the strong; it admits of no mitigation nor pardon, once you have overstepped its limits.
Titus Livius, History of Rome, Book II, §3.
Der Künstler darf eben so wenig herrschen als dienen wollen.
Er kann nur bilden, nichts als bilden, für den Staat also nur
das thun, dass er Herrscher und Diener bilde, dass er
Politiker und Oekonomen zu Künstlern erhebe.
The artist should have as little desire to rule as to serve. He can only create, do nothing but create, and so help the state only by . . . exalting politicians and economists into artists.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, “Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 54.
The day of the android has dawned.
Brian Aldiss, “Are You An Android?,” Science Fantasy #34 (April 1959).
A community which cannot or will not realize how insignificant a part of the universe it occupies is not truly civilized. That is to say, it contains a fatal ingredient which renders it, to whatever extent, unbalanced.
Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958).
The hallmark of crackpot economics is an analysis that somehow leaves out prices, and talks only about such aggregates as income, spending, and employment.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Keynesian Myths,” in Llewlyn Rockwell, Jr., ed., The Free Market Reader (2008), p. 51.