This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.
Oswald Spengler, as quoted in Good Advice (1982) edited by Leonard Safir and William Safire, p. 282
Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy.
Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904), Chapter XVI.
Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.
Jack Vance, The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Chapter Five: “The Pilgrims.”
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop, Fables, “The Wolf and the Lamb.” Illustration: Aesop, with a fox, from the central medallion of a kylix, c. 470 BC; in the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Vatican City.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.
Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.
Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, in Existence (1975).
When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all.
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850).
Schizoid times demand schizoid government.
An excuse-making rumination of the mad dictator, Genghis II Mao IV Khan, in Robert Silverberg’s science fiction novel Shadrach in the Furnace (1976), Chapter 20.