Category: Thought

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).

Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.

Josiah Bartlett, chief executive, president, and governor of the State of New Hampshire, and before that delegate to the Continental Congress — not to be confused with the fictional U. S. President played by Martin Sheen on The West Wing.

There is worldwide pigheadedness about money. There is a willful and even belligerent ignorance concerning ways and means. . . . Not all this ignorance is irrational. Economists, for instance. John Maynard Keynes couldn’t have become a big shot, guiding government intervention in business and finance, if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression. And Alan Greenspan is a success because we all lost our wallets when inflation scared our pants off.

P. J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (1998), p. 235.

A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

Roy Blount, Jr., “Reading and Nothingness, Of Proust in the Summer Sun,” New York Times (June 2, 1985).

Egotism is a bastard word meant to designate something spurious and artificial, not to be confused with the natural egoism or self-assertion proper to every living creature. To condemn the latter would be to condemn life, which could not go on without it; but like every normal faculty, self-assertion has degrees, and passes insensibly from the happy mean to the opposite vices of excess and defect. Egotism, on the contrary, though more or less pronounced, is always a vice because it is founded on a mistake.

George Santayana, postscript to Egotism in German Philosophy (1916).

Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

P. J. O’Rourke, as quoted in Busted : Stone Cowboys, Narco-lords, and Washington’s War on Drugs (2002), edited by Mike Gray.

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Roy Blount, Jr., Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 93.

There is a heartfelt and near-universal refusal to understand the basic economic principles behind the creation of wealth.

P. J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (1998), p. 235.