The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
Giorgio Diaz de Santillana (1902 – 1974), The Crime of Galileo (1958).
On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896).
Common sense, do what it will, cannot avoid being surprised occasionally. The object of science is to spare it this emotion, and create mental habits which shall be in such close accord with the habits of the world as to secure that nothing shall be unexpected.
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter (1927), used as an epigraph by A.E. Van Vogt to The World of Null-A (1945; 1948; 1953), author cited as “B.R.”
As I always say, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government. But it could. It could be a deadly threat indeed to the tyranny that now passes for self-government. If We the People show a little of the pluck of our ancestors, we can recover not only the Constitution but our liberty.
Joe Sobran, “Victory in 2004!” (September 9, 2003).
Once liberated from ambition, a person has nothing to lose by being taken for a fool.
John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), p. 57.
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
William Butler Yeats, speech (June 7, 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Censorship of Films Bill.
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
W.H. Auden, from Epigraph on a Tyrant (1939).
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
O Duty,
Ogden Nash, beginning of “Kind of an Ode to Duty” (1935), collected in I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938).
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of conscientious organizing spinster
That the minute you see her you are aginster?
Why glitter thy spectables so ominously?
Why are thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?
Why art thou fifty per cent. martyr
And fifty-one per cent. Tartar?
Marxism never changes. You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.
Anonymous, in Sales Management (Chicago: Dartnell Corp., 1918-75), vol. 70 (Survey of Buying Power, 1953), p. 80.
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
William Butler Yeats, letter to Ellen O’Leary (February 3, 1889).