Category: Thought

It has been said that youngsters go to jail to learn crime as others go to college to learn who won the Peloponnesian wars and the names of the generals, and how to play football.

It’s true. All penitentiaries are crime schools for the young with brilliant professors, empirical professors, doing the pitching. How any criminal could go to such a school and fail to come out a better criminal, I cannot imagine — because the teaching and the ideas are brilliant, even if in most cases the premise stinks, as in paranoia. 

It would be hard for a you gster to see wherein the premise is faulty. A class in just this in the educational department would be a very good idea.

For instance, one thing youngsters are taught by old cons is that it is vaguely wrong to steal from individuals; but that to heist a corporation is the acme of Robinhoodesque virtue. It does not occur to the youngsters that corporations are composed of individuals. . . .

Jack Woodford, on prison life in his personal report on his short time incarcerated, Home Away From Home (1962), p. 194.

All philosophies have the common property of being speculative, and, therefore, their immediate influence on those who hold them is in many ways alike, however opposed the theories may be to one another: they all make people theoretical. In this sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality, it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation, accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and makes the sorry escapades of human nature from convention seem even more ignominious than its ruling prejudices.

George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (1916), Chapter XVI, “Egotism in Practice.”

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862).

As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death — which sort was the best. “That,” said he, “which is unexpected.”

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 – 120) quoting Gaius Julius Caesar, Roman Apophthegms.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 – 120), “On Listening to Lectures,” Moralia.

He said that those who were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 – 120) quoting Cato the Elder, Roman Apophthegms.

This is a beautiful country.

John Brown, last words (December 2, 1859), as quoted in John Brown and his Men (1894) by Richard Josiah Hinton, p. 397.

An individual may be told she, he, is to die, and will accept it. For the species will go on. Her or his children will die, and even absurdly and arbitrarily — but the species will go on. But that a whole species, or race, will cease, or drastically change — no, that cannot be taken in, accepted, not without a total revolution of the deepest self.

Doris Lessing on the slated role of the Giants on Earth, in her novel Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979), p. 38.

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

Steven Wright, classic one-liner.

There is only one defense against existential death anxiety — denial, which banishes these feelings from consciousness to the deep unconscious.

Robert Langs, as quoted in Ajit Varki & Danny Brower, Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind (2013), p. 123.