Category: Thought

This House, being deeply impressed with apprehension of the great dangers, to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston, in our Sister Colony of Massachusetts bay, whose commerce and harbor are, on the first Day of June next, to be stopped by an Armed force, deem it highly necessary that the said f first day of June be set apart, by the Members of this House, as a day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy Calamity which threatens destruction to our Civil Rights, and the Evils of civil War; to give us one heart and one Mind to firmly oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American Rights; and that the Minds of his Majesty and his Parliament, may be inspired from above with Wisdom, Moderation, and Justice, to remove from the loyal People of America, all cause of danger, from a continued pursuit of Measure, pregnant with their ruin.

Thomas Jefferson’s Fast Day Resolution, as passed by the Colony of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, Peyton Reynolds presiding, May 24th, 1774.

Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.

Eugene Field, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field: The love affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896), “The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me,” (chapter 4), p. 44.

The first years of man must make provision for the last.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 27.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 41.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 26.

“I don’t believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety. . . . Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the USSR, not Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, from a televised conference in Mexico, “The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom,” August 30, 1990.

Nothing . . . will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 6.

Although scientific and technical progress change the world before our very eyes, it is, in fact, based on a very narrow social foundation. The more significant scientific successes become, the sharper will be the contrast between those who achieve and exploit them and the rest of the world. Soviet rockets have reached Venus, while in the village where I live potatoes are still dug by hand.

Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, 1970, p. 66.

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

Dr. Johnson, The Idler, No. 30 (November 11, 1758).

Why is it that people never change their mind — until they do?

Douglass North, as quoted by Mike Munger on EconTalk, “Munger on Slavery and Racism,” August 22, 2016.