Category: Thought

If each human being is to have liberty, he cannot also have the liberty to deprive others of their liberty.

There are two kinds of fools: one says, ‘This is old, therefore it is good’; the other says, ‘This is new, therefore it is better.’

William Ralph Inge was known as Dean Inge, in his heyday.

‘Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, ‘a male friend of mine.’ It’s often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but don’t want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you aren’t one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. ‘A male friend of mine’ also gives — let us admit it — a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.’ ‘They’re afraid women will laugh at them,’ he said. ‘Undercut their world view.’ Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ‘They’re afraid of being killed,’ they said.

Margaret Atwood, Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982), p. 413.

Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion – in the bloody religions of the heathen. There are fanatics in superstition. But there can be no fanatic, however warm their zeal, in the true religion, even although you sell your goods and bestow your money on the poor, and go on and follow your Master. There may, and every hour shows around me, fanatics in the cause of false liberty – that infamous liberty which justifies human bondage, that liberty whose ‘corner-stone is slavery.’ But there can be no fanaticism however high the enthusiasm, in the cause of rational, universal liberty – the liberty of the Declaration of Independence.

Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.

Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself.

I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven,’ but life for the peasant changes little.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.