Category: Thought

Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known & seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper & sufficient antagonist to error.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson : 1816 – 1826(1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 2, p. 102.

I think that email was best interpreted as a performance review — but actually it was a pulse check review. “Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons?” So if you have a pulse and two neurons you can reply to an email. This is, I think, not a high bar, is what I’m saying.

Anyone could accomplish this.

But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is: we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why the can’t respond. And some people who are not real people. Like they’re literally fictional individuals.

Elon Musk, about his DOGE request of all federal government employees to respond to the email with five things they accomplished during the week. Accessed on The Rubin Report, February 27, 2025.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), chapter 3.

The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning.

Mary McCarthy, The Oasis (1949).

The untold story mothers the lie.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994).

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.

Joanna Russ, Existence (1975).