Category: Thought

Voyager upon life’s sea:—
To yourself be true,
And whate’er your lot may be,
Paddle your own canoe.

Edward P. Philpots, Paddle your own Canoe; Written for Harry Clifton. Appeared in Harper’s Monthly, May 1854.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.

Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (1969)

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction

Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 10, p. 148 (concluding sentence)

“Fatality is the universal and rooted prejudice of the East. ‘It was written,’ is there the answer to every thing. Hence result an unconcern and apathy, the most powerful impediments to instruction and civilization.”

C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; first English-language edition, 1802)

In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in early childhood, and before they can develop. The fixed custom which public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it suits them or not.

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).

Conservative, n.

A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with others.

Cynic, n.

A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.

Egotist, n.

A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Idiot, n.

A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

Mayonnaise, n.

One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.

Once, adj.

Enough.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.

Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Anita Pollitzer (December 1915)

“The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.”

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).

“Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority.”

C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; first English-language edition, 1802)

If you are engineering, or you’re in science, or even if you are building a product, yeah, yeah: you totally want to get the facts right. You want to use the best reasoning, the best thinking, etc. But in the realm of politics facts don’t matter. Now, let me clarify that. Facts do matter to the outcome. Of course. If you walk in front of a truck, the truck is a fact, the truck kills you — that matters. But the way people make decisions is so divorced from facts, and always has been, that Trump doesn’t actually add anything that wasn’t already there. All he does is he does it better. Let me say that again: the world of politics was always a hundred percent bullshit. Always. It was just different bullshit. The thing that Trump has added is that he just does more of it and he does it better.