Category: Thought

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961).

The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Bobok : From Somebody’s Diary,” as translated by Constance Garnett in Short Stories (1900).

When told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: “Naturally.” He then added: “And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?”

Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (2006).

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead (1915), as translated by Constance Garnett, p. 16.

Liberty is not the function of the bourgeoisie or any other economy but rather the human soul and its deep needs; it possesses qualities and origins that are not economic but instead moral and religious. . . .

Benedetto Croce, preface to Pagine sulla guerre (1928), as quoted in As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, by Maurizio Viroli, (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Anyone seeking public office was not worthy to hold it.

Joseph Heller, The Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000).

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Gore Vidal, “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969).

Generally the fraud starts out small, and they try to hide it. But then, year after year, if nobody stops the fraud, it gets more and more brazen, and every year it gets bigger, until they’re literally renting out stadiums.

Elon Musk, in conversation with Fox News host Jesse Watters, clarifying why DOGE altered Treasury’s payout system, requiring a receipt before payment is made. This discussion referred to a four billion dollar Department of Education fund. “Fraud at Scale,” May 1, 2025.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969).

The only wisdom I think I’ve attained is the wisdom to be skeptical of other people’s ideology and other people’s arguments. I tend to be a skeptic, I don’t like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don’t like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people.

Joseph Heller, in an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “Joseph Heller — Closing Time” (1998) by Ramona Koval.