Category: Thought

In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.

William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), Aphorism 25.

Fight, fight, fight!

Donald John Trump, former president running for a second term, in Butler, Pennsylvania, just after an assassination attempt, surrounded by Secret Service, pumping his right fist into the air, defiantly. These words are interpreted from his lips, the audio being obscure.

I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening. GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Trump’s first Truth Social post after the event. The assassination attempt occurred about a quarter after Six O’Clock EDST on July 13, 2024.

I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Nothing, zero. No, and I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country. . . .

Jammin’ in New York (1992).

Arrogance in full bloom bears a crop of ruinous folly from which it reaps a harvest all of tears.

Aeschylus, The Persians (472 BC) lines 821–822 (tr. Christopher Collard).

Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world. Not — and that’s not hi . . . — sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., answering George Stephanopoulos’s question about taking a cognitive test and sharing it with Americans, Primetime Special Tonight, ABC, July 5, 2024.

But when a man
speeds toward his own ruin,
a god gives him help.

Aeschylus, The Persians (472 BC) line 742 (tr. Janet Lembke and C. J. Herington).

Time, the devourer of all things.

Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, Book XV, 234.

A prosperous fool is a grievous burden.

Aeschylus, Fragment 383, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

[T]his is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.

Euripides, The Phoenician Women, Line 392 (Jocasta); translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff.

The doctrines of Europe were, that men in numerous associations cannot be restrained within the limits of order and justice, but by forces physical and moral, wielded over them by authorities independent of their will. Hence their organization of kings, hereditary nobles, and priests. Still further to constrain the brute force of the people, they deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus barely to sustain a scanty and miserable life. And these earnings they apply to maintain their privileged orders in splendor and idleness, to fascinate the eyes of the people, and excite in them an humble adoration and submission, as to an order of superior beings. Although few among us had gone all these lengths of opinion, yet many had advanced, some more, some less, on the way. And in the convention which formed our government, they endeavored to draw the cords of power as tight as they could obtain them, to lessen the dependence of the general functionaries on their constituents, to subject to them those of the States, and to weaken their means of maintaining the steady equilibrium which the majority of the convention had deemed salutary for both branches, general and local. To recover, therefore, in practice the powers which the nation had refused, and to warp to their own wishes those actually given, was the steady object of the federal party. Ours, on the contrary, was to maintain the will of the majority of the convention, and of the people themselves. We believed, with them, that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong and protected in right by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will. We believed that the complicated organization of kings, nobles, and priests, was not the wisest nor best to effect the happiness of associated man; that wisdom and virtue were not hereditary, that the trappings of such a machinery, consumed by their expense, those earnings of industry, they were meant to protect, and, by the inequalities they produced, exposed liberty to sufferance. We believed that men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, habituated to think for themselves, and to follow their reason as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed, than with minds nourished in error, and vitiated and debased, as in Europe, by ignorance, indigence and oppression. The cherishment of the people then was our principle, the fear and distrust of them, that of the other party.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Johnson (1823).