Category: Thought

If freedom means that the will may be realized unhampered, then we seem to be freer the more we own, since we have accepted as the meaning of property that we ‘can do whatever we want’ with its content. We do not have ‘freedom’ to do so with other people’s property or with objects which cannot be possessed at all.

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.”

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The World Tomorrow (May 1928).

We can study bacteria, but we can also be studied just like bacteria.

Dmitry Rogozin, Director General of Roscosmos (2018-2022), as quoted in “Dmitry Rogozin: Aliens Could Have Visited Earth, Russia Investigating UFOs,” Newsweek (June 13, 2022).

Men were only made into “men” with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally “a man” any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

Wyndham Lewis, “Call Yourself a Man!,” The Art of Being Ruled (1926).

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females —

“‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”

Democratic Party strategist James Carville, explaining to the New York Times why the Democratic Party is losing the male African-American vote.

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.

Henry Adams, A History of the United States of America During the First Administration of James Madison(1890), Vol. II, Ch. VI: Meeting of the Twelfth Congress; 1921 edition, p. 123.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

H. L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 40.

Truth does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil.

François de La Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Maxims (1665), no. 67 (Leonard Tancock, trans.)

You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842). The same passage in D. J. Hogarth’s translation: “ As things are now, the world has grown stupid to a degree that passes belief.”