Category: Thought

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.

The character “Pardot Kynes” in Frank Herbert‘s Dune (1965).

Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority.

Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; second English-language translation, the Philadelphia edition, 1802).

Men . . . submit every where to oppression, when they have only to lift up their heads to throw off the yoke; yet, instead of asserting their birthright, they quietly lick the dust and say, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Women, I argue from analogy, are degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment; and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter 4.

It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.

Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 14.

When time and labor had developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations.

Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; second English-language edition translated by Thomas Jefferson & Joel Barlow, Philadelphia, 1802).

Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults. A society that takes its solemn adolescents seriously is headed for serious trouble. How humorless and laughable the solemn young! One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.

Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960).

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774).

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).