Category: Thought

Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.

Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself.

I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven,’ but life for the peasant changes little.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Dead Men’s Dialogue” in Dreamtigers (1960)

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.