Category: Thought

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.

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

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean (1949).

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems … self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics (1879).

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. 

Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

Every cause produces more than one effect.

Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” The Westminster Review (April 1857).

There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.

Joseph Addison, The Guardian (1713).

We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.

Alfred Hitchcock, in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1965).

Whoever voluntarily undertakes the necessary office of rearing and educating, obtains the parental power without generation.

Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Book III, Ch. II, § II.

I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.

Alfred Hitchcock, as quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1985) by François Truffaut, p. 109.

Ideas are more important than battles.

The Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner, as quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen.