Category: Thought

My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.

A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues. This may be because vice needs solidarity among those who yield to it in order to be tolerated at all, whereas virtue is its own reward, as the proverb says, and is happily very often its own protection — far more often than not, in our day.

Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 40.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country. 

When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.

President Stephen Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message (December 1886).

We all know how bad we are; but it needs much encouragement to persuade some of us to believe that we can really be any better.

Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 77.

With most men who have moulded, hacked, and chiselled the world into history, to think has been to act.

Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 93.