Category: Thought

Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it.

Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow (1955).

If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn’t the people at the bottom think the same?

Michael Moorcock, The Eternal Champion (1970).

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

H. L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936), p. 279.

. . . there, strung out under the cornice of the building, was the motto, which he had never noticed before, of the Federal Communications Agency:

PLANNED FREEDOM IS
THE ROAD TO LASTING PROGRESS.

So simple, so direct, and yet, when you thought about it, almost impossible to understand.

Thomas M. Disch, “The Man Who Had No Idea,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1978).

Better to make haste slowly than not at all.

Leigh Brackett’s character Amnir, referencing the ancient motto “Festina lente” (hasten slowly) in The Ginger Star (1974). “Festina Lente” has been the motto of the Barons Dunsany in Ireland, and features on the family’s coat of arms.

All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret.

Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone (1965).

None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.

Søren Kierkegaard, in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 96.

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

Sinclair Lewis on the protagonist of Elmer Gantry (1927).

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter V, “Democracy.”

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).