Category: Thought

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

José Ortega y Gasset, “Taboo and Metaphor,” The Dehumanization of Art, 1925.

Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind.

Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (London 1923).

The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible.

William H. Prescott, “Chateaubriand’s English Literature” (1839), p. 245.

Liberty is not the function of the bourgeoisie or any other economy but rather the human soul and its deep needs; it possesses qualities and origins that are not economic but instead moral and religious. . . .

Benedetto Croce, as quoted in As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, by Maurizio Viroli, (Princeton University Press, 2012).

A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism.

Simón Bolívar, Letter from Jamaica, 1815.

All the following want for grace: the poet, who calls it inspiration; the philosopher, who calls it idea; the statesman, who calls it sure eyesight or firm hand; the man of war, who calls it boldness or impetus. Grace appears all of a sudden even to the humblest of men you can imagine, who is so much oppressed by tedium that he sometimes does not know how to get through it. It appears perhaps in the form of a sun ray, or a landscape fresh with verdancy and dew, which infuses new joy and love of life. Who, except for someone vain — and even this only in his empty words — could ever ‘do it alone’ and renounce the assistance of grace?

Benedetto Croce, as quoted in As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, by Maurizio Viroli, (Princeton University Press, 2012).

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge.

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher and outspoken anti-fascist. He called his political philosophy “liberism.”

If you say ‘fascist’ it means ‘Hitler,’ although Hitler was probably more influenced by Stalin than by Mussolini — and ‘Hitler’ means ‘Auschwitz.’ So as soon as you disagree with the prevailing leftist culture or with either of our political parties and they want to call you a name, then you become a ‘fascist,’ which means you support the extermination of millions of people in a concentration camp.

Paul Gottfried, on the Tom Woods Show, April 28, 2016, a discussion of Gottfried’s book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (2016).

If ‘economics tell us’ that our present army of workers, working half time, will be able, under Socialism, to earn twelve and a half times as much as at present — well, then, it is high time to demand proofs. My personal view is that no such proofs exist. The whole idea, in a word, is sheer nonsense. There is no more ground for it, in the actual facts of existence, than for the doctrine that, if I had brown eyes instead of blue, I would be a Methodist bishop at $8,000 a year.

H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).

I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).