Category: Thought

An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.

“To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.”

Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia 1925.

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.

Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.

Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Marion Sonnenfeld, translator (1934)

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations.

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [Die Welt von Gestern], Marion Sonnenfeld, translator (1942)

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

“No wonder historians loathe Harding and Coolidge; these presidents’ success goes to show how much better off the country might be if ambitious politicians with their grandiose plans would just shut up and leave us alone.”

Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide To American History

If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.