Category: Thought

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797).

When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.

Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1927-1927), p. 94.

The distinction, between what is done by labour, and what is done by nature, is not always observed. 
Labour produces its effects only by conspiring with the laws of nature. 
It is found that the agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He does nothing but produce motion. He can move things towards one another, and he can separate them from one another. The properties of matter perform the rest.

James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (1821; 1844), Chapter 1, “Production.”

For those of you who still think that we’ve gotten little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets. This idea of conspiracy theories — if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you . . . I promise you some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend to impress her. There would be leaks.

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, in conversation with Stephen Colbert, CBS (May 5, 2026).

Science is all about taking a look at the consensus and poking a hole in it and testing it and going, “I’m not quite sure of that.”

Ron Johnson, M.D., in an April 23, 2026, interview in The Epoch Times.

The constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (German: 1873; 1896), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (1999), translated by Ronald Speirs.

Non è mai alcuna cosa sì disperata, che non
vi sia qualche via da poterne sperare.

No circumstance is ever so desperate that one cannot nurture some spark of hope.

Niccolò Machiavelli, from The Mandrake (A.D. 1524), Act I, scene 1

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.

Polybius, The Histories, Book XVIII, Chapter 43.

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium,
atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Publius Tacitus, De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae (A.D. 98), Chapter 30, conclusion.

Comincionsi le guerre quando altri vuole,
ma non quando altri vuole si finiscono

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.

Niccolò Machiavelli, from the Florentine Histories — Istorie fiorentine (A.D. 1526).