Category: Thought

It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crop.

Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), writing as George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated [by Richard Rorty] not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to [Antonio] Gramsci’s new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment.

Thus, almost all those who espouse the relativistic ‘methods’ introduced into the humanities by Foucault, Derrida and Rorty are vehement adherents to a code of political correctness that condemns deviation in absolute and intransigent terms. The relativistic theory exists in order to support an absolutist doctrine. We should not be surprised therefore at the extreme disarray that entered the camp of deconstruction, when it was discovered that one of the leading ecclesiastics, Paul de Man, once had Nazi sympathies. It is manifestly absurd to suggest that a similar disarray would have attended the discovery that Paul de Man had once been a communist — even if he taken part in some of the great communist crimes. In such a case he would haved enjoyed the same compassionate endorsement as was afforded to [György] Lukács, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.

Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2005), (pp. 236-237).

However deep you dig a well it affords no refuge in the time of flood.

Ernest Bramah, “The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities,” Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928). Pictured: detail of the cover of the 1974 Ballantine edition of the quoted book.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.

Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (1995), “The Nature of Philosophy” (p. 6).

sciant quae optima sunt esse communia.
    The best ideas are common property.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Richard Mott Gummere (translator), Letter XII.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Your rights are protected by the inability of the Government to do things. That is what the Founders thought.

Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show, Episode 849, “Tearing Down Our Institutions.”

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), Ch. VIII, sec. 95.

Adherence to men, is often disloyalty to principles.

As usurpation is the exercise of power which another has a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. . . .

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), Ch. XVIII, sec. 199.