Category: Thought

It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?

Former Federal Aviation Administration investigator John Callahan, who, as part of an international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials convened at a National Press Club conference, “said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska” [Reuters, Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe,” November 12, 2007].

He who desires or wants to reform the State [government] of a City, and wishes that it may be accepted and capable of maintaining itself to everyone’s satisfaction, it is necessary for him at least to retain the shadow of ancient forms, so that it does not appear to the people that the institutions have been changed, even though in fact the new institutions should be entirely different from the past ones: for the general mass of men are satisfied with appearances, as if it exists, and many times are moved by the things which appear to be rather than by the things that are.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, XXV (1531).

Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.

Epicurus, Principal Doctrines (Robert Drew Hicks, trans.), no. 38.

Never do any enemy a small injury for they are like a snake which is half beaten and it will strike back the first chance it gets.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513).

The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée de l’Écriture sainte (Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, 1709).

Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.

Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, no. 31.

The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.

William Henry Harrison, inaugural address (March 4, 1841); Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington, 1789, to John F. Kennedy, 1961 (1961), p. 72. House Doc. 87–218.

Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.

A scoundrel will be a scoundrel, even with two university degrees.

ἃ πάσχοντες ὑφʹ ἑτέρων ὀργίζεσθε, ταῦτα τοὺς ἄλλους μὴ ποιεῖτε.

What thou thyself hatest, do to no man.

Isocrates, Nicocles, or The Cyprians, 3.61.