Category: Thought

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922).

Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (1998).

I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.

Calvin Coolidge, Calvin Coolidge, Inaugural Address (March 4,1925).

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2005).

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law.

Calvin Coolidge, speech to the Massachusetts State Senate (January 7, 1914).

The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. . . . If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Malcolm X, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (December 13, 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93.

Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results in systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs — if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.

Charles W. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs,” in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 1, No. 2; Reprinted 1971. 

Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?

George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (1996); character Tyrion Lannister to Lord Varys, Master of Whisperers.

Your friends are three and your enemies are three. Your friends are: your friend, your friend’s friend and your enemy’s enemy. And your enemies are: your enemy, your friend’s enemy and your enemy’s friend.

Ali bin Abi Talib (علي بن أبي طالب), Letter 31: “Advice to one of his sons after returning from the Battle of Siffin” (likely composed soon after July 657 of the current era, when the battle took place.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Marshall McLuhan, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 92.