Category: Thought

Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855; 1881)

I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage. 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934).

I wonder what people did before they invented coffee.

Johnny Nolan, a character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, directed by Elia Kazan, written by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, performed by James Dunn); based on the novel of the same name by Betty Smith (1943).

This is just an extraordinary day. It’s a testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy, and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances.

Vice President Kamala Harris yammers on about President Biden’s diplomatic triumph, on the tarmac welcoming freed prisoners from Russia, while the president looks dumbly (or dumbfoundedly) away.

Unreason is at all times one of the happier privileges of patriotism.

Branch Cabell, Ladies and Gentlemen: A Parcel of Reconsiderations (1934), p. 274.

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

André Gide, Autumn Leaves (Feuillets d’automne, 1941, trans. Jeanine Parisier Plottel).

I don’t think our current system gives us any chance of an election result that the country accepts.

Scott Adams, Real Coffee with Scott Adams, Episode 2555 (August 3, 2024).

And they know neither sect nor idolatry, with the exception that all believe that the source of all power and goodness is in the sky, and they believe very firmly that I, with these ships and people, came from the sky, and in this belief they everywhere received me, after they had overcome their fear.

Christopher Columbus, “Letter to the Sovereigns” (1493).

Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951).

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.

Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man: The Study of the New Totalitarians (1939), pp. 245-246.