Category: Thought

Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones.

Theodore Roethke, Poetry and Craft (1965).

O, it is excellent 
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous 
To use it like a giant.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (c.1604; 1623), Act 2, scene 2.

Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer.

Ben Jonson, Sejanus (1603), Act 1.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act V, scene 1, line 34.

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.

George MacDonald, from “Life” in Unspoken Sermons Series II (1886).

National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system — a form of oligarchical collectivism. . . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is therefore nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.

George Orwell, review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau, Time and Tide (May 4, 1940).

You got the MAGA bubble, you got this bubble, that bubble — but the thickest bubble of all is inside Washington. . . . Challenging power is heresy inside Washington.

Cenk Uygur, “Top Biden Aide Breaks Silence on Mental Decline,” The Young Turks (May 18, 2025).

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (April 1946).

Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s?

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book II, “The Golden Thread”; Chapter I: “Five Years Later.”

The anxiety that afflicts Americans comes from the gnawing, inchoate sensation that we are all at the mercy of a society driven by emotional decisions, personalized actions, and subjective thought processes.

Florence King, National Review (May 17, 1999), in STET, Damnit! The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991-2002 (2003), p. 303.