Category: Thought

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The “reality” he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (author of the U.S.A. trilogy), “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, September 1928.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969).

Nature governs man by no principle more fixed than that which leads him to pursue his interest.

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

Herbert Spencer, “On Manners and Fashion,” The Westminster Review (April 1854).

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, Vol. 2 (1906), Ch. III: “Industry, Government.”

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.

Herbert Spencer, “On Manners and Fashion,” The Westminster Review (April 1854).

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean (1949).

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems … self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics (1879).

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. 

Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

Every cause produces more than one effect.

Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” The Westminster Review (April 1857).