Category: Thought

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).

Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they are palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding between the two communities in South Africa can be removed.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Indian Opinion, October 1, 1903.

Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.

Wealth can only be accumulated by the earnings of industry and the savings of frugality.

U.S. President John Tyler, first annual message to Congress (June 1, 1841).

It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation. . . .

Reason in Society, Chapter IV (The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906)

The first Degree of Folly, is to conceit one’s self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1744)

Punish the one who commits the crime;
Punish the evildoer alone.

Ea to Enlil, as related by Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sîn-leqi-unninnī version by John Gardner and John Maier (1984), Tablet XI, Column iv.

Pictured above: Babylonian Gilgamesh Tablet, British Museum

From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best.

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” Cato Policy Report January/February 1998

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (1919)

Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” Cato Policy Report January/February 1998