Category: Thought

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

American composer and insurance innovator Charles Ives, as quoted in “Charles Ives’ Rambunctious ‘Fourth Of July,’ NPR Music (July 3, 2008).

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

Oft attributed to Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., 38th Vice President of the United States.

I am proud of my journalistic philosophy — to tell the world things people do not want me to reveal, to advocate limited government, economic freedom, and a strong, prudent America — and to have fun doing it. For the sober-sided younger generations of journalists, having fun may seem unserious. But it was the kind of journalism that prevailed when I started.

Robert D. Novak, The Prince of Darkness (2007), p. 14.

Every government that has cheapened its currency has been knavishly false to a trust; so have those which, like ours, use public funds to subsidize large-scale gambling and swindling.

Albert Jay Nock, as quoted in Robert M. Thornton, editor, Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock (The Nockian Society, 1970).

I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial. The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy,” Negro Digest (December 1945).

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146.

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you’d have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1921).

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), The Book of Disquiet (1982; posthumous); written (if not exactly published) under the “heteronym” of “Bernardo Soares.”

There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance.

Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1921).