Category: Thought

Journalists say a thing that they know isn’t true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

Arnold Bennett, The Title (1918).

[J]ust because men are in a group, and therefore weakened, receptive, and in a state of psychological regression, they pretend all the more to be “strong individuals.” The mass man is clearly sub-human, but pretends to be superman. He is more suggestible, but insists he is more forceful; he is more unstable, but thinks he is firm in his convictions. If one openly treats the mass as a mass, the individuals who form it will feel themselves belittled and will refuse to participate. If one treats these individuals as children (and they are children because they are in a group), they will not accept their leader’s projections or identify with him. They will withdraw and we will not be able to get anything out of them. On the contrary, each one must feel individualized, each must have the impression that he is being looked at, that he is being addressed personally. Only then will he respond and cease to be anonymous (although in reality remaining anonymous).

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968). This pronouncement is often attributed — with grave authority — to Will Durant alone, cited as from a 1946 Ladies Home Journal article, “What Is Civilization?” This appears to be incorrect: read the article, it’s excellent; but the apothegm is not to be found there.

Analysis is the beggar’s need to explain how riches come to be; whatever he doesn’t possess must have been acquired by swindle; the other merely has the fortune; he, fortunately, knows.

Karl Kraus, arguing against Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis of Michaelangelo, as quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon (1987), Jon Winokur, editor.

Nothing creates more awkwardness than saying things people can’t afford to admit they agree with. Disagreement is manageable. It’s agreement that wreaks havoc. If people disagree, they’ll debate you. If they secretly agree with something, but are furious with you for saying it, then they’ll try to shut you up by any means necessary. As Tom Stoppard puts it, ‘I agree with every word you say, but I will fight to the death against your right to say it.’

Joseph Sobran, “How I Was Fired by Bill Buckley,” Center for Libertarian Studies (1994).

And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.

Bertrand Russell, in “The First War,” eighth chapter of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967), p. 265.

The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

Giorgio Diaz de Santillana (1902 – 1974), The Crime of Galileo (1958).

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896).

Common sense, do what it will, cannot avoid being surprised occasionally. The object of science is to spare it this emotion, and create mental habits which shall be in such close accord with the habits of the world as to secure that nothing shall be unexpected.

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter (1927), used as an epigraph by A.E. Van Vogt to The World of Null-A (1945; 1948; 1953), author cited as “B.R.”

As I always say, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government. But it could. It could be a deadly threat indeed to the tyranny that now passes for self-government. If We the People show a little of the pluck of our ancestors, we can recover not only the Constitution but our liberty.

Joe Sobran, “Victory in 2004!” (September 9, 2003).