Category: Thought

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book I, “Recalled to Life”; Chapter III: “The Night Shadows.”

Give us a catchphrase or a concept and we pounce on it, grind it down, wear it out, and leave it in pieces like a toy on Christmas morning without ever finding out what it was. This is how the Numbing of America works. It just so happens that we are surrounded by things surreal but we have lost the ability to react to them.

Florence King on America’s new catchword, “surreal,” National Review (May 17, 1999), reprinted in STET, Damnit! The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991-2002 (2003), p. 302.

In human affairs, all that endures is what men think.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943), p. 15.

We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories […] but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.

Florence King, “Déjà Views,” in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989), p. 112.

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961).

The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Bobok : From Somebody’s Diary,” as translated by Constance Garnett in Short Stories (1900).

When told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: “Naturally.” He then added: “And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?”

Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (2006).

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead (1915), as translated by Constance Garnett, p. 16.

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, preface to Pagine sulla guerre (1928), as quoted in As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, by Maurizio Viroli, (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Anyone seeking public office was not worthy to hold it.

Joseph Heller, The Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000).