Yes, the U.N. does some good things. But the assumption that, if the United Nations didn’t exist, those good things wouldn’t get done is ridiculous. It’s like saying that if government didn’t pick up your garbage, garbage would never get collected. Meanwhile, the U.N. does all manner of terrible things, that wouldn’t be done if it didn’t exist.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Goldberg File: The U. N. vs. Israel,” December 30, 2016 (National Review newsletter)
War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (1993), Ch. 6
Purpose is what separates success from failure. Those with a guiding purpose, however small, can make a difference in the lives of others.
That is why I always suggest think locally and act locally. You can change the world, even if it is just your own. At the end of the day — or year — that is really all that matters.
Brion McClanahan, email newsletter for The Brion McClanahan Show, December 30, 2016
The old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer if they disregard the record of the past.
Thomas Sowell, “Random Thoughts, Looking Back,” his final syndicated column upon retirement, National Review (December 27, 2016).
The humanoids protect people so well they won’t let them drive a car lest they have an accident or let a woman hold a needle lest she stab herself, . . . With the Patriot Act, people are trying to overprotect us by taking our freedoms away. I’d repeal it if I could.
Jack Williamson, author of The Humanoids (1948) and The Humanoid Touch (1980), science fiction novels in which humanity is overrun with “well-intentioned” robots.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” New Dimensions 3 (Robert Silverberg, ed.), p. 254
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