The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
George Santayana, “Dickens,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).
Other people’s faults can be fascinating. One’s own are dreary.
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 48.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
George Santayana, “Tipperary,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), pp. 10-11.
For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.
Each civilization follows the path of a particular religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa; translated by Richard Zenith based on the 1998 Assírio & Alvim edition, edited by Richard Zenith), §306.
Statesmen are gamesters, and the people are the cards they play with.
David Crockett, first sentence of The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor to General Andrew Jackson (Tenth edition, 1836).
All these guys they call judges? The federal judges? The Supreme Court judges? They’re not really judges. They’re just state agents whose job is to interpret the words written down on paper by other state agents. That’s it. Their job is not to do justice. Which is what a real judge does. A real judge tries to resolve dispute between two parties based upon principles of justices and fairness. These federal judges can’t do that, because their job is to interpret constitution and federal law, which is just positive enactments written down on paper by a bunch of elected bureaucrats, and members of the state. So, I don’t think they’re actual judges. They’re not actually doing law. What they’re interpreting is not law.
Stephan Kinsella, KOL361 | Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington (October 13, 2021).
However elusive the concept may be, there is a universal human feeling, not confined to philosophers, lawyers, or judges, that there is a quality known as justice, and that it is the aim of legal institutions to achieve it. The Constitution invokes that sense and sentiment in its first purposive phrase: it is ordained “to establish justice.” Madison, writing in Federalist No. 51, called it “the end of civil society.” It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” This feeling that justice is a supreme goal, this sense that it is a predicate to organized society, is no mere yearning, for it is only in a fair proceeding, one that comports with our sense of justice, that we can with any legitimacy call another human being to account.
Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. The interest of justice requires more than a proceeding that reaches an objectively accurate result; trial by ordeal might by sheer chance accomplish that. It requires a proceeding that, by its obvious fairness, helps to justify itself.
Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Alvin Benjamin Rubin, U.S. v. McDaniels, 379 F.Supp. 1243 (E.D. La. 1974).
I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog. I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.
David Crockett, after being defeated in the 1830 congressional elections for opposing the Indian Removal Act.
Like the Bolshevik system, the power politics of America now operates on a program of total obedience and conformity.
Stephen Cox, “Biden and the Bolsheviks,” Liberty (July 28, 2024).