Category: Thought

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (c. 478 BC), David Grene translation.

DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It’s the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.  

Elon Musk, Joe Rogan Experience (#2281, 2025).

One of the principal objects of theoretical research is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in the greatest simplicity.

Josiah Willard Gibbs, letter accepting the Rumford Medal (1881). Quoted in A. L. Mackay, Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (London, 1994).

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.