Category: Thought

A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.

Taylor Caldwell, The Devil’s Advocate (1952).

Leap year began in the year 45 B.C. under Julius Ceasar. This is true. He started the leap year in order to correct the calendar and we still do it to this day. Another thing that happened under Julius Ceasar was, uh, he was such a powerful maniac that all the senators grabbed knives and they stabbed him to death. That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back.

John Mulaney, Saturday Night Live monologue for February 29, 2020.

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.

Thriller-​writer Tom Clancy, Kudlow & Cramer interview (September 2, 2003).

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in New Dimensions 3, Robert Silverberg, editor.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Victor Hugo, “Thoughts,” Postscriptum de ma vie, in Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography, Funk and Wagnalls (1907) as translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke.

The monopolist … never has unlimited control; he merely has the choice within the laws of price of different ‘economically possible’ price levels. He can select that price at which the combination of profit for each article, and the number of articles to be sold at that price, are likely to promise the greatest total profit, but he cannot exert his ‘power’ in any other way than in conformity with the laws of price, for it is his behavior that establishes the ‘price law,’ namely the conditions of the amount offered at a given price level, but never can he counteract the laws of price.

Eugen von Böhm-​Bawerk, “Control or Economic Law,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtshaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Volume XXIII (1914): 205 – 71; John Richard Mez, Ph.D., translator.