Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 46 (October 9, 1917).
War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that the enemy too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), p. 187.
Like many other things, the laudable ideal of combining education and research has its seamy side, in that graduate teaching offers an opportunity to recruit cheap (and in a way forced) labour for the captains of the research industry.
The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state’s power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History
Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.
Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.
Jacob Burckhardt was a teacher and reserved, cautious mentor to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Cranks are a byproduct of free thought and a consequence of liberation from orthodoxies.
Michael Malice, The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics (2019), p. 5.
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.
There is nothing which a prudent man must shun more carefully than living with a view to popularity and giving serious thought to the things esteemed by the multitude, instead of making sound reason his guide of life, so that, even if he must gainsay all men and fall into disrepute and incur danger for the sake of what is honourable, he will in no wise choose to swerve from what has been recognized as right.
St. Basil of Caesarea, On Greek Literature
There’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands.
New York Mayor Bill di Blasio, presidential campaign ad.
We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest of us.
William Hepworth Thompson (1819–1886), attributed in Collections and Recollections by George W. E. Russell (1898) and also in Trinity College An Historical Sketch by G.M. Trevelyan (1943).