Category: Thought

Kurt Vonnegut

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

Thought

“If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune. No doubt there are usually more and sharper quarrels between parents and children, than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of household management to change a father’s right into a right of property, and count children but as slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, is furthered by handing the whole authority to one man.”

Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus (1677; translated by A. H. Gosset, 1883), Ch. 6, Of Monarchy

Thought

John Milton

“Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

Thought

C. S. Lewis

“And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943

Thought

John Milton

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

Thought

Thomas Jefferson

“I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.”

Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, August 17, 1811

Thought

Justin Martyr

“Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honour and love only what is true, declining to follow traditional opinions, if these be worthless. For not only does sound reason direct us to refuse the guidance of those who did or taught anything wrong, but it is incumbent on the lover of truth, by all means, and if death be threatened, even before his own life, to choose to do and say what is right.”

Justin Martyr, First Apology, c. 155-157 AD

Thought

Thomas Jefferson

“Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.”

Thomas Jefferson, from his Argument in the Case of Howell vs. Netherland (April 1770)

Thought