Category: Thought

We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

Jean-​Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).

Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.

Charles Willeford, personal motto, quoted in Marshall Jon Fisher, “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000.

The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 “Year Zero,” the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money — only work and death.

John Pilger, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979).

My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.

A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues. This may be because vice needs solidarity among those who yield to it in order to be tolerated at all, whereas virtue is its own reward, as the proverb says, and is happily very often its own protection — far more often than not, in our day.

Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 40.