Category: Thought

A grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharg’d.

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IV, line 55.

Prosperity or egalitarianism — you have to choose. I favor freedom — you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Nothing is so common as to imitate one’s enemies, and to use their weapons.

Voltaire, “Oracles” (1770), Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770 – 1774).

It is more blessed to define than to be defined.

F. Marion Crawford, Don Orsini (1892). See also Thomas Szasz on defining others.

Nothing is more uncertain than the result of any one throw; few things more certain than the result of many throws. When applied to human life, the law of averages exhibits many striking results.

James A. Garfield, ”Effects of The Rebellion on Southern Life Insurance Contracts : Argument made before the Supreme Court of the United States in the Cases of the New York Life Insurance Company v. Statham et al. and the Same v. Charlotte Seyms.“ (April 26, 1876)

The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.

Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930).