When I was growing up, we were taught the stories of people whose inventions and scientific discoveries had expanded the lives of millions of other people. Today, students are being taught to admire those who complain, denounce, and demand.
Thomas Sowell, “Random Thoughts, Looking Back,” his final syndicated column upon retirement, National Review (December 27, 2016).
In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H club — the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.
Delivered in San Diego, California, by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, September 11, 1970, as written by William Safire, speechwriter
No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Stars Below,” Orbit 14 (Damon Knight, ed.), p. 204
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. . . . Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Victor Frankenstein of Justine Moritz in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Introduction to the 1831 edition
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
Dorothy L. Sayers, “Are Women Human?” (1938)
Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.
Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 5.
Most government and corporate leaders would have trouble getting people to follow them out of a burning building. One way you can tell the worst of them is that they talk about leadership a lot. I doubt Winston Churchill ever used the word. Or, for that matter, Attila the Hun.
Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 5.
Society . . . as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.
Anders Chydenius, The National Gain (1765), §5.
[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.
Yes, it was not journalism’s finest hour. But, MacAllister often argued, it never had been.
Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 24.