Category: Thought

“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”

You have to use deception to a degree. Either you deceive your source or you deceive your audience. The problem with journalism and the reason why it’s in decline is because these ‘leakers,’ these ‘sources’ in government and elsewhere intentionally transmit stuff to the media [who] parrot it to the masses.

James O’Keefe on the nature of modern major network and cable news, and Brian Stelter’s recent confession that CNN doesn’t do investigation, in conversation with Dave Rubin, The Rubin Report, May 3, 2019.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
 Between the crosses, row on row,
 That mark our place; and in the sky
 The larks, still bravely singing, fly
 Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
 We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
 Loved and were loved, and now we lie
 In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
 To you from failing hands we throw
 The torch; be yours to hold it high.
 If ye break faith with us who die
 We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
 In Flanders fields.

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830).

We must be severe, not only with ourselves, but with other also; exigent, not only with ourselves, but with others also; and so, on the contrary, benevolent not only towards others, but also toward ourselves; compassionate, not only toward others, but also towards this instrument of labour that we carry about with us and of which we sometimes demand too much; that is, our empirical individuality. Reality is neither democratic nor aristocratic, but both together; it abhors the privilege of some over others as much as that equality, according to which each one must have the same value as the other at every moment.

Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (1913, 1967), p. 429.

In the not-so-distant future, the bulk of our culture will be composed of designer viruses. Why? Because now that we know how to design them, we will. We will conquer the conceptual landscape as surely as we conquered the wilderness.

Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), p. 196.

Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943), p. 292.

In every country of the world, economic self-rule by the people is frustrated to some extent by state intervention to protect sectional interests. By ‘economic self-rule by the people,’ I simply mean the demo-cratic exercise of consumers’ sovereignty. Under a free market system, income receivers as a whole control the economy through the discipline they exercise over decision-makers, through buying or refraining from buying the services and commodities offered in the market. The present is a restrictionist, not an equalitarian or liberal age; and I know of no country in which the state forbids all creation of scarcity, that is, all action for the benefit of at least some politically powerful sections.

William H. Hutt (left, above), The Economics of the Colour Bar (1964), p. 176-7.