Category: Thought

When I read Wired, the book written by (what’s his name?) Woodward, about Belushi — I read like five pages of Wired — and I went, “Oh, my God: they framed Nixon.” . . . If this is what he writes about my friend that I’ve known for half of my adult life, which is completely inaccurate — talking to people of the outer, outer circle, getting the story — what the hell could they have done to Nixon?

Bill Murray in conversation with Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience (March 1, 2025), #2282.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, letter (September 16, 1821).

The thing about a lie is that if you’ve been gullible, if you’ve fallen for the lie, you need to stay within the lie or otherwise you feel like you’re stupid, you feel like you’ve been made a fool of. It’s how lockdowns worked, and how vaccines worked — even now, with what we know, what’s coming out every single day, those who fell for the lie don’t want to leave the lie because to leave the lie means they have to face the reality that they were idiots.

Katie Hopkins, “Zelensky just got kicked out the WHITE HOUSE” (March 1, 2025).

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” second essay from Essays (1847 edition).

Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known & seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper & sufficient antagonist to error.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson : 1816–1826(1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 2, p. 102.

I think that email was best interpreted as a performance review — but actually it was a pulse check review. “Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons?” So if you have a pulse and two neurons you can reply to an email. This is, I think, not a high bar, is what I’m saying.

Anyone could accomplish this.

But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is: we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why the can’t respond. And some people who are not real people. Like they’re literally fictional individuals.

Elon Musk, about his DOGE request of all federal government employees to respond to the email with five things they accomplished during the week. Accessed on The Rubin Report, February 27, 2025.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), chapter 3.

The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning.

Mary McCarthy, The Oasis (1949).

The untold story mothers the lie.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994).

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.

Joanna Russ, Existence (1975).