Category: Thought

The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn (1977, posthumous)

The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace.’ But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.

J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to his son Christopher Tolkien (August 9, 1945)

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Voltaire, Zadig (1747).

Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local.

Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861 (1994).

Nothing is a greater stranger to my breast, or a sin that my soul more abhors, than that black and detestable one, ingratitude.

Letter to Governor Dinwiddie, 1754

Our mind . . . functions on a dualistic model of perceiving and organizing the world into mutually-exclusive categories. We organize our experiences, through both formal and informal methods of learning, around “either-or” concepts. Something is either “A” or “non-A,” “animal” or “vegetable,” “hot” or “cold,” a process that unavoidably leads us to see the world as a series of divisions. That the rest of the universe functions in an indivisible manner, without any apparent awareness of the partitions into which our minds have organized it, is a further limitation on our capacities for understanding.

Butler Shaffer, Boundaries of Order (2015)

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

Milton Friedman, “The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community” (1983)

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Voltaire, Zadig (1747).

When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.

Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom (1943).

It’s nice to elect the right people, but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

Milton Friedman, c. 1977