Category: Thought

In the last three years, the ruling class in the United States has been found out. They tipped their hand with outrageous deployments of grotesque power. They closed the schools without any real basis. They shut the churches. They imposed a deadly shot on unwilling takers who never needed them. They ruined millions of lives, traumatizing nearly everyone, and for a virus that for most people was not a medically significant threat

Jeffrey Tucker, “What Kind of Political Storm Is Coming?” The Epoch Times (September 19, 2023).

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Vol. III, p. 100.

“The conclusion I’ve come to is effectively that the means that these elites use are actually the ends that they seek….

“The means that they’re using — or attempting to use, or beginning to implement — are the ends being sought. They don’t want you driving cars; they don’t want you having an air conditioner; they don’t want you even burning logs in your backyard; now I read, today, they don’t want you to have pets. There’s just an insane amount of stuff. . . . we’re talking about a totalitarian order that’s being ushered in.”

Michael Rectenwald on the Part of the Problem podcast, September 16, 2023.

I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden?

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond (1852), first page of Book One.

People who love their children do not drill holes in their children’s life raft.

Eric Weinstein on the Modern Wisdom podcast.

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

Niels Bohr, as quoted by Edward Teller, in “Dr. Edward Teller’s Magnificent Obsession” by Robert Coughlan, in LIFE magazine (September 6, 1954), p. 62.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman, address “What is Science?,” presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320.

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery. 
Equality of rights is a peculiar feature of democracies. These rights are properly divided into civil and political, though even these definitions are not to be taken as absolute, or as literally exact.

James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America (1838).

We boil at different degrees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (1870).