Category: Thought

Reprehendenti filio Tito, quod etiam urinae vectigal commentus esset, pecuniam ex prima pensione admovit ad nares, sciscitans num odore offenderetur; et illo negante: “Atqui,” inquit, “e lotio est.”
Titus complained of the tax which Vespasian had imposed on the contents of the city urinals. Vespasian handed him a coin which had been part of the first day’s proceeds: “Does it smell bad?” he asked. And when Titus said “No” he went on: “Yet it comes from urine.”

Money doesn’t stink.

“Pecunia non olet” is a popular recasting of a famous conversation between Emperor Vespasian [Titus Flavius Vespasianus] to his son Titus Flavius Vespasianus [the future emperor Titus], upon the latter’s objection to a tax on Rome’s urinals — as quoted by Suetonius [above], in The Twelve Caesars, Robert Graves and Michael Grant, translators (Harmondsworth, 1979).

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.

Theodore Roethke, Poetry and Craft (1965).

The best way out is always through.

Robert Frost, “A Servant of Servants,” North of Boston (1914).

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).