Category: Thought

Of all the miserable, unprofitable, inglorious wars in the world [the worst] is the war against words. Let men say just what they like. Let them propose to cut every throat and burn every house — if they so like it. We have nothing to do with a man’s words or a man’s thoughts, except to put against them better words and better thoughts, and so to win in the great moral and intellectual duel that is always going on, and on which all progress depends.

Auberon Herbert, Westminster Gazette (1893), as quoted in Theodore Schroeder, Free Speech for Radicals: Seven Essays (1912), p. 43.

Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.

Titus Livius (c. 59 BC – 17 AD), History of Rome, Book XXVI, sec. 11.

The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895).

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

Titus Livius (c. 59 BC – 17 AD), Ab urbe condita (History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, 1960), Introduction.

I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don’t know if it can be both. 

Elon Musk, referring to Donald Trump’s ballyhooed “Big Beautiful Bill,” to CBS Sunday Morning, aired June 1, 2025.

Atque etiam recordatus quondam super cenam, quod nihil cuiquam
toto die praestitisset, memorabilem illam meritoque
laudatam vocem edidit: “Amici, diem perdidi.”

One evening at dinner, realizing that he had done nobody any favour throughout the entire day, he spoke these memorable words: “My friends, I have wasted a day.”

Suetonius on Titus Flavius Vespasianus, in The Twelve Caesars, Robert Graves and Michael Grant, translators (Harmondsworth, 1979), Chapter 8.

To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.

Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).

Reprehendenti filio Tito, quod etiam urinae vectigal commentus esset, pecuniam ex prima pensione admovit ad nares, sciscitans num odore offenderetur; et illo negante: “Atqui,” inquit, “e lotio est.”
Titus complained of the tax which Vespasian had imposed on the contents of the city urinals. Vespasian handed him a coin which had been part of the first day’s proceeds: “Does it smell bad?” he asked. And when Titus said “No” he went on: “Yet it comes from urine.”

Money doesn’t stink.

“Pecunia non olet” is a popular recasting of a famous conversation between Emperor Vespasian [Titus Flavius Vespasianus] to his son Titus Flavius Vespasianus [the future emperor Titus], upon the latter’s objection to a tax on Rome’s urinals — as quoted by Suetonius [above], in The Twelve Caesars, Robert Graves and Michael Grant, translators (Harmondsworth, 1979).

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.

Theodore Roethke, Poetry and Craft (1965).

The best way out is always through.

Robert Frost, “A Servant of Servants,” North of Boston (1914).