Category: Thought

And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world.

Algernon Blackwood, The Damned (1914).

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.

Saki, The Unbearable Bassington, ch. 13 (1912).

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958).

It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.

John Caldwell Calhoun, speech in the U. S. Senate (1848). Calhoun’s image (above), a detail from a portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy.

It takes imagination to identify an economic principle. It takes still more imagination to follow the implications of the principle outside the context of commercial activity and explore its psychological, social, and political meanings.

Stephen Cox, in Cox and Paul Cantor, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (2010).

Even during my father’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign, it was, ‘Do you want to grow up and be governor one day?’ ‘No. I am four.’

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.

John Caldwell Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (1851), p. 90. Calhoun’s image (above), a detail from a portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy.

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.