Category: Thought

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Gore Vidal, “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969).

Generally the fraud starts out small, and they try to hide it. But then, year after year, if nobody stops the fraud, it gets more and more brazen, and every year it gets bigger, until they’re literally renting out stadiums.

Elon Musk, in conversation with Fox News host Jesse Watters, clarifying why DOGE altered Treasury’s payout system, requiring a receipt before payment is made. This discussion referred to a four billion dollar Department of Education fund. “Fraud at Scale,” May 1, 2025.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969).

The only wisdom I think I’ve attained is the wisdom to be skeptical of other people’s ideology and other people’s arguments. I tend to be a skeptic, I don’t like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don’t like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people.

Joseph Heller, in an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “Joseph Heller — Closing Time” (1998) by Ramona Koval.

Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them.

Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, 1938 (1941, Eng. translation).

A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.

John Cleese, from an interview with The A. V. Club (2008).

Idiot, n.

A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

Mayonnaise, n.

One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.

Once, adj.

Enough.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

We must be severe, not only with ourselves, but with others also; exigent, not only with ourselves, but with others also; and so, on the contrary, benevolent not only towards others, but also toward ourselves; compassionate, not only toward others, but also towards this instrument of labour that we carry about with us and of which we sometimes demand too much; that is, our empirical individuality. Reality is neither democratic nor aristocratic, but both together; it abhors the privilege of some over others as much as that equality, according to which each one must have the same value as the other at every moment.

Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (1913, 1967), p. 429.

Cannon, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
Capital, n. The seat of misgovernment.

Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

I’m struck by how laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.

John Cleese, From The Human Face, BBC Television (2001).