Category: Thought

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).

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).