Category: Thought

There is actually more debt in the world than there is money. So yes, probably, it’s gonna get paid — as soon as we borrow something from another planet.

Ismo Leikola, from a stand-up bit shown on a Facebook “reel.”

If one behaved as a good citizen or a charitable person simply because one was dreadfully scared of the state placing one in jail, one would not be a good citizen or person but barely more than a circus animal.

Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (1998), p. 11.

On March 28, AD 193, after assassinating the Roman Emperor Pertinax, his Praetorian Guards auctioned off the throne to Didius Julianus — thus was politics in the Year of the Five Emperors.

Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we—because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.

Rose Wilder Lane, journal entry (1923), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 7, by William V. Holtz (1993).

History shows how the human mind, which, at the dawn of civilisation, was a lyre of three chords, became in the progress of civilisation a lyre of seven chords. . . .

G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (1879), p. 157.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

George Eliot, the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Ch. 4 (1879).

The people of the United States are entitled to a sound and stable currency and to money recognized as such on every exchange and in every market of the world.

Ethics requires the kind of personal reflection, in the end, that no one else can do decisively for any individual.

Tibor R. Machan, The Promise of Liberty: A Non-Utopian Vision (2009), p. 69.

What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?

When the devil comes he’s not gonna have horns, he’s gonna have a crew neck sweater and glasses.

Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).