Category: Thought

Get over yourself!

Hillary Clinton explaining to Jimmy Fallon why you shouldn’t complain about the choice between Biden and Trump. “Those are the two choices,” she said.

A metafísica é uma consequência de estar mal disposto.

Metaphysics is a consequence of not feeling very well.

Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria (1928), trans. Richard Zenith.

“Someone asked me about cancel culture, and I said, ‘If you’re going to be canceled, this is the culture that you want to be canceled from.’ Because who wants to be part of this culture?”

Woody Allen, as interviewed by Sam Wasson, “All the Romance of Filmmaking Is Gone,” Air Mail (April 6, 2024).

The law of supply and demand applies to tomatoes and also to ideas. Demand for research that bolsters arguments for bad policy leads to supply of research. Truth provides some constraints but doesn’t always prevail.

David Barker, “Climate Alarmists’ Bad Science,” Wall Street Journal (April 3, 2024.

There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.

Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 428.

Having touched Christ’s feet is no excuse for punctuation mistakes.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Richard Zenith, translator.

The series of natural phenomena could be described in their entirety without mentioning the value of things; and our scale of valuation remains meaningful, whether or not any of its objects appear frequently or at all in reality. Value is an addition to the completely determined objective being, like light and shade, which are not inherent in it but come from a different source.

Georg Simmel, this passage translated by David Frisby, The Philosophy of Money (1978), § ““Freedom as the articulation of the self in the medium of things” from the chapter “Synthetic Part: Individual Freedom.”

The two traditional political divisions, liberal and conservative died with Covid. Now there are simply the sane versus the insane. The sane have had enough of being pushed around by the insane. The insane don’t register much of what reality tries to tell them. They have a body of insane ideas to comfort and protect them from reality’s rigors. To call that body of ideas an “ideology” is way too polite.

James Howard Kunstler, “Wake-up Call,” March 22, 2024.

No one party can fool all of the people all of the time; that’s why we have two parties.

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Voltaire, Zadig (1747).