Category: Thought

If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (1957)

I have come to think, especially since my trip to Spain, that civil liberties must be protected at every stage. In Spain, I am sure that the introduction of GPU methods by the Communists did as much harm as their tank men, pilots, and experienced military men did good. The trouble with an all-powerful secret police in the hands of fanatics, or of anybody, is that once it gets started, there’s no stopping it until it has corrupted the whole body politic. I am afraid that’s what’s happening in Russia.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (author of the U.S.A. trilogy), “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, September 1928.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

Dawn Powell (1896-1965), The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page (1998).

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.

The character “Manuel the Redeemer,” in James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption (1926), Book Four: “Coth at Porutsa,” Ch. XXV: “Last Obligation upon Manuel.” See also Beyond Life: Dizain des Démiurges (1921), pp. 45.

A state is as sound as its thriftiest citizens. A social order is sick when it has to tax its thrifty citizen to provide for its poor. When a social order has no other choice but to so, that social order is doomed.

Whittaker Chambers, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” The American Mercury (April 1944), p. 94.

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The “reality” he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (author of the U.S.A. trilogy), “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, September 1928.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969).

Nature governs man by no principle more fixed than that which leads him to pursue his interest.

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

Herbert Spencer, “On Manners and Fashion,” The Westminster Review (April 1854).

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, Vol. 2 (1906), Ch. III: “Industry, Government.”