Category: Thought

A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain.

William Saroyan, Madness in the Family (1988).

It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. No ever, in the long history of the world.

Taylor Caldwell, “Honoria” (1957); republished in The New American, Vol. 19, No. 20 (October 6, 2003).

Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal — the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).

I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog (2002).

Right now we have a country with no president, and we’ve moved on. And what’s Taylor Swift doing?

Eric Weinstein speaking to Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast, September 4, 2024.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Robert Anton Wilson, The Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (1991).

Regarding Science as a gradually increasing sphere, we may say that every addition to its surface does but bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience. There must ever remain therefore two antithetical modes of mental action. Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something which phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge cannot monopolize consciousness — if it must always continue possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends knowledge; then there can never cease to be a place for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter is that which passes the sphere of experience.

Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1867).

Anyone in the United States today who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.

Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (1980).

The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind.

Friedrich August von Hayek, as quoted in Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001).

To live at all is miracle enough.

Mervyn Peake, title of a poem as well as his epitaph.