“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).
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.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.
Denis Diderot, as translated by Derek Coleman, in Diderot’s Selected Writings (1966).
Beware of the man who wants to set things in order. Setting things in order always involves acquiring mastery over others — by tying them hand and foot.