Category: Thought

This is a beautiful country.

John Brown, last words (December 2, 1859), as quoted in John Brown and his Men (1894) by Richard Josiah Hinton, p. 397.

An individual may be told she, he, is to die, and will accept it. For the species will go on. Her or his children will die, and even absurdly and arbitrarily — but the species will go on. But that a whole species, or race, will cease, or drastically change — no, that cannot be taken in, accepted, not without a total revolution of the deepest self.

Doris Lessing on the slated role of the Giants on Earth, in her novel Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979), p. 38.

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

Steven Wright, classic one-liner.

There is only one defense against existential death anxiety — denial, which banishes these feelings from consciousness to the deep unconscious.

Robert Langs, as quoted in Ajit Varki & Danny Brower, Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind (2013), p. 123.

Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Roger Bacon, in Robert Belle Burke The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2 (2002), p. 583.

And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

William Whewell, Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, The Equilibrium of Forces on a Point (1819).

In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.

Herodotus, The Histories, Book I, Chapter 87.

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

Pericles, as quoted in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Book II (1945), Chapter 40.

This book raises issues that might not be apparent from the table of contents. 
It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humanness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or “enclosed society,” with its submission to magical forces, to the “open society” which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Introduction.

Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.

William Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, Lecture 7 (1852).