Category: Thought

Kissing don’t last; cookery do!

George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), chapter 28.

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 ft/sec, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.

Only use lizard sources.

Gavin McInnes, on The Gavin McInnes Show, characterizing modern p.c. University standards of essay writing, making fun of postmodern pedagogy. For full context, see:

The relevant section begins about 3:34 in the video. The full quotation makes complete sense.

Neither machines, nor the commodities made by them, rise in real value, but all commodities made by machines fall, and fall in proportion to their durability.

[W]ith respect to economy . . . [u]nder this relation society consists only in a continual succession of E X C H A N G E S, and exchange is a transaction of such a nature that both contracting parties both gain by it. . . .

We cannot cast our eyes on a civilized country without seeing with astonishment how much this continual succession of small advantages, unperceived but incessantly repeated, adds to the primitive power of man.

It is because this succession of changes, which constitutes society, has three remarkable properties. It produces concurrence of force, increase and preservation of intelligence and division of labour.

The utility of these three effects is continually augmenting.

M. Destutt Tracy, Traité de la volonté, English translation titled A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan; W. A. Rind & Co. Printers, 1817), pp. xvi-xvii.

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, p. 1.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Philosopher Robert Nozick explaining why freedom cannot be maintained in a statist society, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974).

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.