Category: Thought

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.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Friedrich von Schlegel, “Selected Aphorisms from The Athenæum” (80), from Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 1797–1800, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (1968), translators.

Equality of rights is the first of rights.

Personal motto of Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance” in Collected Essays (1959).

Christ wanted love to be called his single commandment. This we owe to all men. Nobody is excepted.

Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians (1548), p. 39, as translated by Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press: 1992).

Do you guys know that saying, ‘Don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach’? Because you end up buying too much. That’s the same for us except it’s — it goes a little different, the saying — ‘Don’t go to the bulk food store if you’ve ever had a communist dictator.’” Because you buy too much.

Andrea Jin, stand-up comic, complaining about her grandparents’ apparent need for “34 bags of rice at home,” from her special “Grandma’s Girl.”

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aldous Huxley, “Religion and Time,” Vedanta for the Western World (1945), Christopher Isherwood, editor.

It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.

Thomas Jefferson, in 1808, from Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States (1829), p.112.

Christ seeks souls, not property. . . . He who wants a large part of mankind to be such that . . . he may act like a ferocious executioner toward them, press them into slavery, and through them grow rich, is a despotic master, not a Christian; a son of Satan, not of God; a plunderer, not a shepherd.

Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians (1548), p. 40, as translated by Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press: 1992).