Category: Thought

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.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), p. 44.

Poverty is the lack of many things, but avarice is the lack of all things.

Publilius Syrus, from the Sententiae.

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.

George Santayana, “The Irony of Liberalism,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

Publilius Syrus, from the Sententiae. Image from the movie “Being There” (1979), from the novel by Jerzy Kosinski.

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).