Personal collection of quotations — Ernie Davis

Some of these are, it seems to me, relevant to AI and knowledge representation. All of them are quotes that I often think of.

I also have a small collection of cartoons and illustrations.

The United States is now known to the world as “the country that can’t or won’t do anything to stop its children from semi-regularly being gunned down in classrooms,” not even measures that virtually every other comparable country on earth has successfully taken. It’s become the symbol of national decline, dysfunction, and failure. If so, then the stakes here could fairly be called existential ones—not because of its direct effects on child life expectancy or GDP or any other index of collective well-being that you can define and measure, but rather, because a country that lacks the will to solve this will be judged by the world, and probably accurately, as lacking the will to solve anything else.
— Scott Aaronson, An Understandable Failing Shtetl-Optimized, May 29, 2022.

That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads--"Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of Burdens"--which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad.     ...

That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia. The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.
— W.H. Auden, from "September 1, 1939"
[as excerpted and slightly misquoted (the original has "Children afraid of the night") without attribution by George Orwell in "Pleasure Spots". Personally, Orwell's version seems to me an improvement.]

Whether one says 'Among men' by saying inter homines or by saying inter hominibus does not affect the person considering things rather than signs. In the same way, what else is a barbarism except a word pronounced with letters or sounds different from those which those who spoke Latin before us were accustomed to use? Whether ignoscere is spoken with a long or short third syllable makes little different to a man asking God to forgive his sins, in whatever way he can pronounce the word. What then is integrity of expression, except the preservation of the customs of others, confirmed by the authority of ancient speakers?

The more men are offended by these things, the weaker they are. And they are weaker in that they wish to seem learned, not in the knowledge of things, by which we are truly instructed, but in the knowledge of signs, in which it is very difficult not to be proud.
— Augustine, On Christian Doctrine Trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr.

Next I was put to school to get learning, in which I (poor wretch) knew not what use there was; and yet, if idle in learning, I was beaten. For this was judged right by our forefathers; and many, passing the same course before us, framed for us weary paths, through which we were fain to pass; multiplying toil and grief upon the sons of Adam. ...

For will any of sound discretion approve of my being beaten as a boy, because, by playing a ball, I made less progress in studies which I was to learn, only that, as a man, I might play more unbeseemingly? and what else did he who beat me? who, if worsted in some trifling discussion with his fellow-tutor, was more embittered and jealous than I when beaten at ball by a play-fellow?
— Augustine Confessions, Trans. Edward B. Pusey

"It is one thing," said she, presently — her cheeks in a glow — "to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this."
— Jame Austen, Emma

Suprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
— Jane Austen, Emma [Mr. Knightly]

She was obliged to recollect that her seeing the letter was a violation of the laws of honour, that no one ought to be judged or to be known by such testimonies, that no private correspondence could bear the eye of others.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion

It is not a fatal objection to Moore that his is the morality of a leisured class. No doubt we should all be working to bring about social changes which would make it possible for everyone to take so lofty a view. It is more of an objection that it is the morality of a leisured class of prigs. ... Among the highest goods, not one physical pleasure is included. Since lust is rated as one of the greater evils, the implication is that it is better to contemplate one's lovers' perfections than to enjoy the possession of their bodies. Russell said of Moore's admirers that ... "they aimed ... at a life of retirement among fine shades and nice feelings, and conceived of the good as consisting in the passionate mutual admiration of a clique of the elite."
— A.J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

To all of this we need to add the tendency that took root in MI [military intelligence] to rely almost exclusively on technological means of warning and to make light of the lessons of the past.

I saw that tendency myself less than two months ago. On the 50th anniversary of the intelligence blunder in the Yom Kippur War, I presented to a forum of high-level MI personnel what my research had identified as the roots of the failure. First and foremost was the psychological tendency of a number of ranking MI personnel, who clung to the "concept" until the last minute, even though all the information they were receiving cried out that war was imminent. A second talk to that forum dealt with an experiment in which the data that was available on the eve of the war was fed into an artificial intelligence program, in order to examine whether AI could be used as a substitute for human thought. The major focus of interest in the discussion that developed after these talks was on various issues relating to the ability of the machine to identify threats. The psychology of the human failures to heed warnings was not of any special interest to MI.
Uri Bar-Joseph, "Israel's Deadly Complacency Wasn't Just an Intelligence Failure," HaAretz November 11, 2023

Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he asked a question and received an answer.
— Max Beerbohm, "A Clergyman" , And Even Now

LEONARDO:
I am an artist and an engineer,
Giv'n o'er to subtile dreams of what shall be
On this our planet. I foresee a day
When men shall skim the earth i' certain chairs
Not drawn by horses but sped on by oil
Or other matter, and shall thread the sky
Birdlike.
— Max Beerbohm, " `Savonarola' Brown" Seven Men

If the children of today can get electric grain elevators and tin automobiles for Christmas, why aren't they that much better off than their grandfathers who got only wristlets? Learning the value of money, which seems to be the only argument of the stand-patters, doesn't hold very much water as a Christmas slogan. The value of money can be learned in just about five minutes when the time comes, but Christmas is not the season.
— Robert Benchley, "A Good Old-Fashioned Christmas."

I asked a relatively small but random sample of intelligent viewers of the film [Lina Wertmüller's Seven Beauties] — all of them under forty — who were deeply impressed by it how they though Pasqalino had survived. They all said he survived because of his will — his vitality — as the film wishes us to believe. Not one of these highly intelligent, college-educated, otherwise well-informed people spontaneously said that Pasqualino survived because the camps were liberated by the Allied Armies.
— Bruno Bettelheim, "Surviving", The New Yorker, August 2, 1976.

Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire. (A fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him.)
— Nicholas Boileau, "L'Art Poétique"

This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down ... d'you really think you could stand upright, in the wind that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake.
— Robert Bolt, ``A Man for All Seasons''.

CROMWELL: In the May of 1526 the King published a book. (He permits himself a little smile). A theological work. It was called A Defence of the Seven Sacraments.
MORE: Yes. (Bitterly) For which he was named "Defender of the Faith," by His Holiness the Pope.
CROMWELL: By the Bishop of Rome. Or do you insist on "Pope"?
MORE: No, "Bishop of Rome" if you like. It doesn't alter his authority.
CROMWELL: Thank you, you come to the point very readily; what is that authority? As regards the Church in Europe; (Approaching) for example, the Church in England. What exactly is the Bishop of Rome's authority?
MORE: You will find it very ably set out and defended, Master Secretary, in the King's book.
— Robert Bolt, ``A Man for All Seasons''.

[Babbage and Jevons] have conclusively proved, by the unanswerable logic of facts, that calculation and reasoning, like weaving and ploughing, are work, not for human souls, but for clever combinations of iron and wood.
— Mary Boole (widow of the logician George Boole) The Message of Psychic Science 1868.
Thanks to Haym Hersh for correcting a misquotation here.

It is demonstrable that the faculties on which depends the possibility of logic and algebra must have been evolved in connection with an intime and private family life; they could have had no origin anywhere else. They have been used, and therefore modified for the uses of the individual and his contemporaries; but their source was — male and female engaged in peopling the world of the future.
— Mary Boole, Collected Works. Quoted in The Life and Work of George Boole by Desmond MacHale.

Let us admit what all idealists admit: that the nature of the world is hallucinatory. Let us do what no idealist has done; let us look for the unrealities that confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in Zeno's dialectic.

``The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?''

I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know that it is false.
— Jorge Luis Borges, ``Avatars of the Tortoise,'' Other Inquisitions.

[The quote from Novalis is from Teplitz Fragments #48.]

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.
— Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins"

That crowded day gave me three heterogeneous surprises: the physical happiness I experienced when they told me that Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the enigmatic and obvious enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler.
— Jorge Luis Borges, "A Comment on August 23, 1944"

In a stable that stands almost within the shadow of the new stone church, a gray-eyed, gray-bearded man, stretched out amid the odors of the animals, humbly seeks death as one seeks for sleep. ... The angelus awakens him. By now the sound of the bells is one of the habits of evening in the kingdoms of England. But this man, as a child, saw the face of Woden, the holy dread and exultation, the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will die, and in him will die, never to return, the last eye-witness of those pagan rites; the world will be a little poorer when this Saxon dies. ...

In the course of time there was a day that closed the last eyes to see Christ. The battle of Junin and the love of Helen each died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die, what pitiful or perishable form will the world lose? The voice of Macredonio Fernandez, the image of a red horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
— Jorge Luis Borges, "The Witness"

Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)

Not with vain tears, when we're beyond the sun
We'll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows,find
Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there

Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

— Rupert Brooke

After the maggid's [the Maggid of Mezrich] death, his disciples came together and talked about the things he had done. When it was Rabbi Schneur Zalman's turn he asked them, "Do you know why our master went to the pond every day at dawn and stayed there for a little while before coming home again?" They did not know why. Rabbi Zalman continued, "He was learning the song with which the frogs praise God. It takes a very long time to learn that song."

— Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim vol. 1.

Guilt, after all is not just self-inflicted injury, but productive moral work. At any time, "guilty" will describe almost any conscience functioning as it should.

— Christopher Caldwell, "No way out: When evil was a social system", The New Republic July 15, 2013.

To a man to whom power is all-important, other men are judged by how much they give to him. So it was with Robert Moses and Vincent R. Impellitteri. Moses' final evaluation of the bumbling little man who had presented such a pathetic figure in his high office: ``He was a good mayor."

To a man to whom power is all-important, other men matter only so long as they possess power.

So it was with Robert Moses and Vincent R. Impellitteri. Years after his retirement, the one-time mayor would sit for an interview in the law offices where he was kept, with little work to do, as window dressing ...

The one-time mayor was almost pathetically glad to have someone to talk to about his days as mayor. And he was very glad indeed to talk about Bob Moses, once he had taken care to make sure the interviewer understood that it had always been he, not Moses, who had given the orders during the old days. (``He would get to Gracie Mansion early in the morning. He had what he called an agenda.'' Pause. ``And sometimes I had an agenda.'') ...

He went on for some time reminiscing about how close he and Moses had been. Then, however, he was asked when he had last seen Moses. And the sincere, friendly face turned sad as he tried, in vain, to recall the last time he had seen the big, charming, brilliant man who had once been so friendly to him.

``I haven't seen him recently,'' he said at last.

— Robert Caro, The Power Broker

Many of the high-flown metaphysical and moral conclusions drawn from `Celtic' art by its admiring critics are suspiciously like an elaboration of the idea that curves are more natural than corners. With a curve, like with a Celt, you might be anywhere and one thing flows into another; with a corner, like with an Anglo-Saxon, you know where you are: nature makes curves, humanity makes corners.
— Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth p. 226.

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence. . . . In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning.
— Anton Chekhov, "The Kiss"

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Common sense is a wild thing, savage and beyond rules.
— G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

The bolder and freer [a lad] seems, the more the traditions of the college or the rules of the club will hold him in their gyves of gossamer; and the less afraid he is of his enemies, the more cravenly he will be afraid of his friends. Herein lies indeed the darkest peril of our ethical doubt and chaos. The fear is that as morals become less urgent, manners will become more so; and men who have forgotten the fear of God will retain the fear of Littimer [ from David Copperfield]. We shall merely sink into a much meaner bondage. For when you break the great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
— G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

We have Murdstone as he would be to a boy who hated him; and rightly, for a boy would hate him. We have Steerforth as he would be to a boy who adored him; and rightly, for a boy would adore him. It may be that if these persons had a mere terrestrial existence, they appeared to other eyes more insignificant. It may be that Murdstone in common life was only a heavy business man with a human side that David was too sulky to find. It may be that Steerforth was only an inch or two taller than David, and only a shade or two above him in the lower middle class; but this does not make the book less true. In cataloguing the facts of life, the author must not omit that massive fact, illusion.
— G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.
— Winston Churchill, paper sent to the Cabinet, January 1914.
Quoted in Clive Ponting, Churchill, p. 132, with the citation CAB (Cabinet paper) 37/116/48 10.1.14. When Churchill later published this in The World Crisis (p. 185) in 1923. he toned it down, deleting the words "an innocent record and", and "mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force", and changing "altogether disproportionate" to "immense".

The great churchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came from all over Europe. Anselm came from Aosta, via Normandy, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc had made the same journey, starting from Pavia. ... It couldn't happen in the Church, or politics, today; one can't imagine two consecutive archbishops of Canterbury being Italian. But it could happen — does happen — in the field of science; which shows that where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly.
— Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

And no one man's belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone. Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handed on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege and an awful responsibility, that we should help create the world in which posterity will live. ...

Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his beliefs with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on any unworthy object and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.

It is not only the leader of men, statesman, philosopher or poet that owes this bounden duty to mankind. Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit to her children beliefs which shall knit society together or rend it into pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station can escape this universal duty of questioning all we believe.
— William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief

Physics-envy is the curse of biology. When somebody else has done the dirty, tedious work of showing that a mathematically formulated physical principle leads to predictions correct to a specified number of decimal places in the boring world of Euclidean 3-space with Cartesian coordinates, theoreticians and textbook writers can axiomatize, generalize, and dazzle your eyes with the most coordinate-free, cosmically invariant representations you please. The areas of learning Rosen has united by these formal analogies are provinces of Atlantis, and the deed and lot numbers of the foundations on which his analogies rest are recorded nowhere.
— Joel E. Cohen, "Mathematics as Metaphor", Science 1971.

Thus ended our little talk: yet it left a pleasant impression. True, the subject was strange enough; my sisters might have been shocked at it; and at my freedom in asking and giving opinions. But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
— Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life

As an academic, I stand in awe of journalists, especially investigative journalists. I spend months and sweat bullets trying to write up, with competent accuracy and clarity, information that is in my narrow area of specialization, fundamentally straightforward, and easily accessible, and that those who know are mostly eager to share. I find it absolutely amazing how well and accurately journalists write, against deadlines of days or hours, information that is often on some topic completely new to them and that very powerful and unscrupulous people are very anxious to keep hidden.
— Ernie Davis, Facebook post, August 25, 2019.

The occupational vice of academics is vanity.
— Philip J. Davis, in conversation.

The ideal mathematician feels prepared, if the occasion should arise, to meet an extragalactic intelligence. His first effort to communicate would be to write down (or otherwise transmit) the first few hundred digits in the binary expansion of pi. He regards it as obvious that any intelligence capable of intergalactic communication would be mathematical and that it makes sense to talk about mathematical intelligence apart from the thoughts and actions of human beings. Moreover, he regards it as obvious that binary representation and the real number pi are both part of the intrinsic order of the universe.

The following dialogue once took place between the ideal mathematician and a skeptical classicist.

S.C. You believe in your numbers and curves just as Christian missionaries believed in their crucifixes. If a missionary had gone to the moon in 1500, he would have been waving his crucifix to show the moon-men that he was a Christian and expecting them to have their own symbol to wave back. You're even more arrogant about your expansion of pi.

I.M. Arrogant? It's been checked and rechecked, to 100,000 places!

S.C. I've seen how little you have to say even to an American mathematician who doesn't know your game with hypersquares. You don't get to first base trying to communicate with a theoretical physicist; you can't read his papers any more than he can read yours. The research papers in your own field written before 1910 are as dead to you as Tutankhamen's will. What reason in the world is there to think that you could communicate with an extragalactic intelligence?

I.M. If not me, then who else?

S.C. Anybody else! Wouldn't life and death, love and hate, joy and despair be messages more likely to be universal than a dry pedantic formula that nobody but you and a few hundred of your type will know from a hen-scratch in a farmyard?

I.M. The reason my formuals are appropriate for intergalactic communication is the same reason they are not very suitable for terrestrial communication. Their content is not earthbound. It is free of the specifically human.

S.C. I don't suppose the missionary would have said quite that about his crucifix, but probably something rather close, and certainly no [more] absurd and pretentious.

— Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience.

In 1935, seventeen years into Poland’s independence, in the midst of an economic depression, just as Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s grave was being prepared in Kraków and his heart was being interred in Vilna, just after the new 1935 Constitution reduced the powers of the parliament and just before antisemitic agitation began to spread like an “avalanche,” Hirsch Mac (Matz) wrote, in Yiddish, a guide to Polish health-resorts called Kurerter un Turistik in Polin — Health-Resorts and Tourism in Poland.

,,,

It is a strange feeling, of course, to be confronted with a forward-facing vision of the past, particularly one written four years before the Holocaust, particularly one like Mac’s. We might wonder how, as a Jew in Poland in 1935, he was able to speak about the present and about the future without once addressing anti-semitism or the Jewish role in the nation. We might accuse him of wearing waterfall-tinted glasses — and say that his perspective is only useful in showing us how he saw Poland through how he wanted to see the health-resorts, that it is detached from reality. We might find his belief in the therapeutic properties of radium naive, even disturbing. The very idea of a movement which was based in nature and yet not particularly concerned with safeguarding it from development might seem short-sighted, hypocritical, extractive. And yet, his optimism has a way of defiantly weathering the test of time. The book is a landscape: limited, beautiful, incomplete, but grounded in the physicality of the health-resorts, their locations, and facilities, and growth, their carefully crafted and wide-ranging solutions to all sorts of illnesses, their clean air and comfortable accommodations. Reading it, one cannot help but be a bit swept up in its image. One cannot help but feel hopeful for the past.
— Ruth Davis, ``Health-Resorts and Tourism in Poland (1935): a Yiddish Landscape of Progress''

[I]n politics ... the only passion that matters is a passion for the ordinary, because we live in the ordinary. Nothing gold can stay. Provocations don’t stay provoking. You start out full of fire and if you’re successful in your professionalization goals you get an office and settle in to filing grant applications. That’s life. This is what the radical left can’t understand, is bent on not understanding: if you’re only into it when it’s exciting, if you can only get the energy to participate when you’re rioting in the streets, you’re not really into it at all. You’re just a tourist. Real left organizing is renting the Portapotties for a demo.
— Freddie deBoer, "Effective Altruism has a Novelty Problem".

Suppose there were a person of whom our sub-personal account (or a similar one) without the pain center were true. What are we to make of the supposition that he does not experience pain, because the sub-personal theory he instantiates does not provide for it? First, we can make the behaviorist's point that it will be hard to pick him out of a crowd, for his pain behavior will be indistiguishable from that of normal people. But also, it appears, he will not know the difference, for, after all, under normally painful circumstances he believes he is in pain, he finds he is not immune to torture, he gladly takes aspirin and tells us, in one way or another, of the relief it provides. I would not want to take on the task of telling him how fortunate he was to be lacking the je ne sais quoi that constituted real pain.
— Daniel Dennett, "Why you can't make a computer that feels pain," Brainstorms

To be a member of the liberal elite today is to live a life that is as regulated as an Orthodox Jew’s and to possess a conscience that’s as tortured as a Calvinist’s.
— William Deresiewicz, Disenchantment and Dogma, Salmagundi, Fall 2021-Winter 2022.

ואמרת בלבבך כחי ועצם ידי עשה לי את החיל הזה
[Lest] you say in your heart, "My strength and the power of my hand has made this wealth for me."
— Deuteronomy 8:17.

All the other swindlers on earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretense of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them to myself as notes!
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations chapter 28.

"That is a curious association of ideas, is it not, mamma?"

"Upon my word, my dear, I don't know" replied Mrs. Nickleby. "Roast pig — let me see. On the day five weeks after you were christened, we had a roast — no that couldn't have been a pig, either, because I recollect there were a pair of them to carve, and your poor papa and I could never have thought of sitting down to two pigs — they must have been partridges. Roast pig! I hardly think we ever could have had one, now I come to remember, for your papa could never bear the sight of them in the shops, and used to say they always put him in mind of very little babies, only the pigs had much fairer complexions; and he had a horror of little babies, too, because he couldn't very well afford any increase to his family and had a natural dislike to the subject. It's very odd now, what can have put that in my head. I recollect dining once at Mrs. Bevan's, in that broad street, round the corner by the coachmaker's, where the tipsy man fell through the cellar-flap of an empty house nearly a week before quarter-day and wasn't found till the new tenant went in — and we had roast pig there. It must be that, I think that reminds me of it, especially as there was a little bird in the room that would keep on singing all the time of dinner — at least, not a little bird, for it was a parrot, and he didn't sing exactly, for he talked and swore dreadfully, but I think it must be that."
— Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, chapter 41.

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

But not perceiving this quite plainly — only seeing it by halves in a confused way — the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a bad grace, and DO grumble very much. Then this respectability of Mr. Vholes is brought into powerful play against them. "Repeal this statute, my good sir?" says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. "Repeal it, my dear sir? Never, with my consent. Alter this law, sir, and what will be the effect of your rash proceeding on a class of practitioners very worthily represented, allow me to say to you, by the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class of practitioners would be swept from the face of the earth. Now you cannot afford — I will say, the social system cannot afford — to lose an order of men like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady, acute in business. My dear sir, I understand your present feelings against the existing state of things, which I grant to be a little hard in your case; but I can never raise my voice for the demolition of a class of men like Mr. Vholes." The respectability of Mr. Vholes has even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary committees, as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney's evidence. "Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice indisputably occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some delay. Question: And great expense? Answer: Most assuredly they cannot be gone through for nothing. Question: And unspeakable vexation? Answer: I am not prepared to say that. They have never given ME any vexation; quite the contrary. Question: But you think that their abolition would damage a class of practitioners? Answer: I have no doubt of it. Question: Can you instance any type of that class? Answer: Yes. I would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes. He would be ruined. Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a respectable man? Answer:" — which proved fatal to the inquiry for ten years — "Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a MOST respectable man."
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House.

Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell.
— Emily Dickinson, My life closed twice before its close

That [ some foreign diplomat ] is the most dangerous statesman in Europe, except, as your father would say, myself, or, as I would prefer to put it, your father.
— Benjamin Disraeli, talking at a party to one of Gladstone's daughters.

'The Cup' is a lovely poem, and the scenery, grouping &c. are beyond all praise; but really as a play there is nothing in it. There are just two events in it. The villian (Mr. Irving) tries to carry off Camma and kills her husband — and afterwards wants her to marry him and share his throne. Whereupon she does the (dramatically) obvious thing, accepts him, and makes a poisoned cup a very early ingredient of the marriage ceremony. Both drink it so both die. Why she should die, Mr. Tennyson only knows! I suppose he would say, 'It gives a roundness and finish to the thing'. So it does; but a heroine who would poison herself for that must have an almost morbid fondness for roundness and finish.
— Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), letter to Helen Feilden, April 12, 1881

Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch looked coldly at him. "I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?"

"I believe in Russia. ... I believe in her orthodoxy. ... I believe in the body of Christ. ... I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia. ... I believe ..." Shatov muttered frantically.

“And in God? In God?”

“I ... I will believe in God.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed

As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, chapter 1.

Ab abusu ad usum non valet consequentia. (An inference from the abuses to the uses of something is not valid.)
— John Dryden, "Preface" to Fables, Ancient and Modern
[ Dryden certainly did not originate this; he is quoting it as a well-known maxim. However, in some amount of search, this is the earliest source I can find for it.]

If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation. If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Readers of contemporary moral philosophy will be familiar with thought experiments (or "intuition pumps") — scenarios involving runaway trolleys, comatose violinists, and teleportation machines — that are intended to elicit our "intuitions" about right and wrong, used to buttress principles, refute arguments, support or falsify ethical theories. It has seemed to many contemporary philosophers nearly impossible to do philosophy, and in particular ethics, without these tools. But Millgram's book offers us a more humane way of harvesting the intuitions required for ethical theorizing.

By investigating the life of a real human being whose disappointments, ecstasies, and aporias were all his own, we are reminded that the true topic of ethics, a human life and how to live it well, is better served by examining a life in its fullness , in all its complexity and apparent contradiction, than the sparse and faceless thought experiments we usually encounter.
— Jonathan Egid, ``Work-life balance: Applying the project view to the life of John Stuart Mill." Review of John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life by Elijah Millgram. Review in the Times Literary Supplement, March 19, 2021.

Brandeis is a name that cannot be merely adopted. It is one that must be achieved.
— Albert Einstein, quoted in Brandeis University: A Host At Last by Abram Sachar.

You have not said to yourself, "I must know this exactly," "I must understand this exactly," "I must do this exactly."
— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Every task involves constraint.
Solve the thing without complaint.
These are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains.
Structures, strictures, though they bind
Strangely liberate the mind.
— James Falen, quoted in Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter

Let us end this chapter by pointing out that among the many phenomena studied by the Greeks there were two very strange ones: that if you rubbed a piece of amber you could lift up little pieces of papyrus, and that there was a strange rock from the island of Magnesia which attracted iron. It is amazing to think that these were the only phenomena known to the Greeks in which the effects of electricity or magnetism were apparent. [Feynman seems to have forgotten lightning.] [ end of chapter 1 ]

... [ the longest ellipsis you will ever see .]

We now close our study of electricity and magnetism. In the first chapter we spoke of the great strides that have been made since the early Greek observations of the strange behavior of amber and of lodestone. Yet in all our long and involved discussion, we have never explained why it is that when we rub a piece of amber we get a charge on it nor have we explained why a lodestone is magnetized ... So you see this physics of ours is a lot of fakery — we start out with the phenomena of lodestone and amber, and we end up not understanding either of them very well. But we have learned a tremendous amount of very exciting and very practical information in the process. [ end of chapter 37 ]
— Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics, vol. 2

There are three adjectives in English that are generally used pejoratively, but, if things were rightly understood, would be terms of the highest praise: "pharisaical", "puritanical", and "jesuitical".
— Louis Finkelstein, in addressing a meeting of Jesuits [quoted from memory]

But the most unusual thing he saw on the Moon was a valley where all the things lost on Earth were found, of whatever kind: crowns, riches, renown, an infinity of hopes, the time one gives to leisure, the alms one plans to give after death, the verses one presents to princes, and the sighs of lovers.
— Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the plurality of worlds trans. H.A. Hargreaves
De Fontenelle is summarizing an episode in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Ariosto goes on for hundreds of lines; I much prefer de Fontenelle's version

I believe I have omitted mentioning that in my first Voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and haul'd up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food and on this Occasion, I consider'd with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem'd very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, and when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you. So I din'd upon Cod very heartily and continu'd to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
— Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

It is hard to love Augustine. He stands as the source of some of the most baleful traditions of thought in Western culture. All humans, he held, are born indelibly marked, indelibly marred, by original sin. Human desire, especially sexual desire, is a premier sign and effect of Adam's fall. Unbaptized babies go to hell. Salvation is a question not of human effort, but of divine predestination. The church, to propound spiritual truth and to protect it, should avail itself of the coercive power of the state. These are all Augustinian teachings.

And yet it is hard not to love Augustine. He states his questions and his convictions about the human condition with such ardor that the flames of his ideas leap across the chasm of sixteen centuries from his lifetime into our own. Against the best philosophy of his day, he insisted that the human being was more than a mind sojourning in an inconvenient body. Flesh, he urged, truly is the native home of spirit: body and soul belong together, and together make up the whole person. Memory, he asserted, defines and constitutes self. And love, as he passionately and relentlessly wrote, is the hinge of the soul, the motor of the will. What moves us is not what we know, but what we want. We are what we love.
— Paula Fredricksen, Textual Healing, The New Republic July 11, 2005.

Come then, we'll walk (what else is there to do?)
Down to the goosey river, where the weir
Spreads like our dreama and seethes throughout the year
Into the secret fields. Just me and you
Tracking the shape and startled peekaboo
Of a lost roe deer (surprised to see us near)
But fixed in curiosity, not fear)
These are the meadow, and our rendezvous.
— First eight lines of Marston Meadows: A corona for Prue. John Fuller, Times Literary Supplement July 8, 2021.
This is the most formally virtuosic poem I have ever seen. It is a corona of sonnets: That is, there are 15 sonnets. The last line of each is the first line of the next and the last sonnet consists of the first lines of the previous 14. Moreover. Fuller follows an ABBAABBA CDECDE rhyme scheme throughout.

So the fight in [the English Civil War] actually was over the ideas and beliefs that the people who fought it said it was: religious values, political convictions, ideas about the state and ideas about the individual, and, most powerfully, ideas about judicial process against a counter-ideal of absolutist obedience. The ideas in seventeenth-century London were distributed strangely, widely, and often eccentrically. But people held genuine beliefs, and the history is most lucidly understood as their clash.
— Adam Gopnik, There is Nothing Elitist about the Indictments Against Trump, The New Yorker August 16. 2023

The freedom to abandon one's community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so ... the real question is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.
— David Graeber and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything

The company of the ruler is the darkness of the longest night. Seek light from the sun, and be hopeful for its rise.
— Hafez.

HUGO: And what am I supposed to inagurate?
...
DIRECTOR: The liquidation!
HUGO: The liquidation? Of what?
DIRECTOR: Of the Inauguration Service of course!
...
DIRECTOR: Well, who's going to inaugurate it?
HUGO: Who? Well — surely —- the responsible inaugurator!
DIRECTOR: The responsible inaugurator? But the inaugurators cannot inaugurate while they are being liquidated, can they?
HUGO: Right. That's why it ought to be inaugurated by the responsible liquidation officer.
DIRECTOR: The responsible liquidation officer? But the job of of a liquidation officer is to liquidate, not to inaugurate!
HUGO: Right. That's why it'll be necessary to organize special inaugurational training of liquidation officers.
DIRECTOR: Oh?
HUGO: Or rather, a liquidational training of inaugurators?
DIRECTOR: Well, you ought to know that!
HUGO: Best if both trainings were organized at the same time. Inaugurators will be training liquidation officers, while liquidation officers will be training inaugurators.
DIRECTOR: And will it then be inaugurated by a liquidation officer trained by an inaugurator, or by an inaugurator trained by a liquidation officer?
HUGO: Another training will have to be organized. Inaugurationally trained liquidation officers training liquidationally trained inaugurators, and liquidationally trained inaugurators training inaugurationally trained liquidation officers.
DIRECTOR: And will it then be inaugurated by a liquidationally trained inaugurator trained by an inaugurationally trained liquidation officer, or by an inaugurationally trained liquidation officer trained by a liquidationally trained inaugurator?
HUGO: By the latter of course!
DIRECTOR: I see you've thought the matter through to the end. In theory.
— Václav Havel, The Garden Party

Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield", Twice Told Tales

— Heinrich Heine, Neue Frühling [New Spring], 34. trans. Louis Untermeyer

I can't help preferring champagne to ditch water — I doubt if the universe does.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Letter to William James, March 24, 1907.

To believe that wherever a best manuscript gives possible readings it gives true readings, and that only where it gives impossible readings does it give false readings is to believe that an incompetent editor is the darling of Providence, which has given its angels charge over him lest at any time his sloth and folly should produce their natural results and incur their appropriate penalty. Chance and the common course of nature will not bring it to pass that the readings of an MS are right whenever they are possible and impossible wherever they are wrong; that requires divine intervention; and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been better employed elsewhere.
— A.E. Housman, Preface to Manilius

A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas. If a dog hunted for fleas on mathematical principles, basing his researches on statistics of area and population, he would never catch a flea except by accident. They require to be treated as individuals; and every problem which presents itself to the textual critic must be regarded as possibly unique.
— A.E. Housman, The application of thought to textual criticism

Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
— A.E. Housman. Saturae of Juvenal.

And oh, my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad,
For that is very much the safest plan.
— A.E. Housman, "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy"

The night is freezing fast
    Tomorrow comes December
        And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
    And chiefly I remember
        How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
    Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
        Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
    His overcoat for ever,
        And wears the turning globe.

— A.E. Housman, "The Night Is Freezing Fast"

We dream of Joseph and weave him an amazing technicolor coat; yet, like the emperor, he is really wearing nothing but ideas.
— Nicholas Humphrey, ``Know Thyself: Easier Said than Done,'' New York Times Book Review July 31, 2011.

There is something truly grotesque about all this playing out as children around the country and the world strike from school to protest against climate emergency. In Westminster, a generation who will never be forgiven don’t even have the thing they won’t be forgiven for on their radar. It is left, shamefully, to actual kids to point it out.
— Marina Hyde, "Our destiny is in the hands of Rees-Mogg’s unfinished robot sidekick" The Guardian, Feb. 15, 2019.

In the provincial town of N. there were so many barbershops and funeral parlors that it seemed as though the town's inhabitants were born solely to get a shave and a haircut, freshen up with some Vegetal, and then promptly expire.
— Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petros, The Twelve Chairs.

To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.
— William James, "What is an instinct?" Scribner's Magazine, 1887.

Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise glory in his wisdom; and let not the strong glory in his strength; let not the rich glory in his riches. But let him who glories, glory in this: that he understands and knows Me. For I the Lord act with kindness, justice, and righteousness in the world; for in these I delight, declares the Lord.
— Jeremiah 9:22-23.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us. If therefore the profession you have chosen has some unexpected inconveniences, console yourself by reflecting that no profession is without them; and that all the importunities and perplexities of business are softness and luxury, compared with the incessant cravings of vacancy and the unsatisfactory expedients of idleness.
— Samuel Johnson, Letter to James Boswell, Aug. 21, 1766.

To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship; and though it must be allowed, that he suffers most like a hero who hides his grief in silence,

Spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem [Aeneid 1.209]

His outward smiles conceal'd his inward smart — DRYDEN

I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. JOHNSON. 'There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.'
— Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, July 9, 1763.

Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
— Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, July 21, 1763.

Sir, you are giving a reason for it, but that will not make it right. You may give a reason why two and two should make five; but they will still make but four.
— Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, March 15, 1779.

To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprize is above the strength that undertakes it: To rest below his own aim is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little. When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined,... But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement ...
— Samuel Johnson, Preface to the English Dictionary

As someone said to me — I can't remember now who it was -- it is really remarkable that when you wake up in the morning you nearly always find everything in exactly the same place as the evening before. For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore, as that man truly said, it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why, he said, the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day.
— Franz Kafka, deleted passage from The Trial.

The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come, and it dismisses you when you go.
— Franz Kafka, The Trial

The plain, discomfiting fact is that every one of us who has watched plays and films or read books or listened to music or looked at paintings and architecture is, in some measure, self-deceived. Filed away in the recesses of our minds are thousands of opinions that we have accumulated through our lives, and they make us think that we know what we think on all these subjects. We do not. All we know is what we once thought, and any earlier view of a work, if tested, might be hugely different from what we would think now.
— Stanley Kaufmann, "In Our Heads," The New Republic August 21, 2000, pp. 32-34.

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, Part III: "A Supplementary Account of Helen Keller's Life and Education"

Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. 'Nothing in particular,' she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.

How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter's sleep. I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me. Occasionally, if I am very fortunate, I place my hand gently on a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song. I am delighted to have the cool waters of a brook rush through my open fingers. To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. To me the pageant of seasons is a thrilling and unending drama, the action of which streams through my finger tips.
— Helen Keller, Three Days to See

At St. Patrick's College, the idea of woman as enemy embraced even the beautiful Baroness von Trapp, who came with her singing daughters and sons to Australia in the nineteen-fifties and performed at the seminary. In an unprecedented breach of tradition, the von Trapps were admitted to the chapel for High Mass, a testament to the Baroness's standing within the Church, and to the fact that she travelled with her own chaplain. As the von Trapps sang some of the Church's most famous hymns — "Panis Angelicus," "Veni Creator Spiritus" —- a number of us began to loose our vocations in favor of the sunny, sumptuous womanhood we saw joined in harmony.

The rector had prepared a room in which the visitors and their chaplain could dine after the service. It was unimaginable that they should be permitted to eat with the men of the seminary. But as we proceeded in silence up the corridor to our own refectory we were delighted to hear the Baroness rejecting the idea of separate dining and demanding blithely to eat with "the boys." Having sung their Lorelei plainchant, our dazzling visitors in dirndls joined us.

For days afterward, the von Trapps were the talk of the seminary, so much so that a few seminarians declared themselves unfit for the priesthood and left. The young men who departed were not regarded as responding to something healthy in themselves; they were pitied by the rest of us — including me —- as failures.
— Thomas Keneally, "Cold Sanctuary: How the Church lost its mission" New Yorker, June 17,2002.

"When we overinterpret error," she insists, "we underestimate craft;" in trying to pay a compliment to poets' unconscious brilliance and aesthetic infallibility, we are in fact insulting their skill as self-conscious artificers who care about getting things right.
— Evan Kindley, "To Err is Poetic" Review of The Poet's Mistake by Erica McAlpine, New York Review of Books, February 11, 2021.

[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquiered. ... True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth ... A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
— Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" (April 1967)

It works like this. You start with a vague stereotype about the failings of other people that you’d like to lend some scientific heft — to take Damore’s example, the idea that ``women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men.'' You note that this behaviour is not particularly useful in an environment where just about everybody has to feign interest in some kind of tedious nonsense just so they can feed themselves; it’s not, in evolutionary parlance, an adaptive trait. But humans are no longer biologically evolving; if people are behaving in this way, it must be because these traits evolved to be advantageous in what’s called the "Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness:" an assumed, theoretical environment of pure biological utility which is supposed to have existed in the Pleistocene, the hunter-gatherer era stretching from two and a half million years ago to just ten thousand years short of the present, the age that produced those strange markings in the caves of Europe. This environment, it’s assumed, was exactly the same for everyone, and those primitive plains still haunt our perceptions today. If women aren’t making as much money programming Google gadgets to collect data on every aspect of our lives, it must be because evolution once gave men the skills needed to throw a stick at a reindeer, while women were stuck with the traits for childrearing and patience.

In scientific terms, this is bullshit. None of its accounts are testable or disprovable; evopsych is, for all its pretensions to rationality, a collection of just-so stories.
— Sam Kriss, What the Caves are Trying to Tell Us , The Outline September 17, 2017.

Refutations, inconsistencies, criticism in general are very important but only if they lead to improvement. A mere refutation is no victory. If mere criticism, even though correct, had authority, Berkeley would have stopped the development of mathematics and Dirac could not have found an editor for his papers.
— Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations

Aorta (pronounced A-orta) is the vessel through which courses the life-blood of Strine [Australian] public opinion. Aorta is a composite but non-existant Authority which is held responsible for practically everything unpleasant in the Strine way of life; for the punishment of criminals; for the weather; for the Bomb and the Pill; for all public transport; and for all the manifold irritating trivia of everyday living. ...

Aorta is, in fact, the personification of the benevolently paternal welfare State to which all Strines - being fiercely independant and individualistic - appeal for help and comfort in moments of frustration and anguish. The following are typical examples of such appeals. ...

`Aorta stop all these transistors from cummer ninner the country. Look what they doone to the weather. All this rine! Doan tell me it's not all these transistors - an all these hydrigen bombs too. Aorta stoppem!'

`Aorta have more buses. An aorta mikem smaller so they don't take up half the road. An aorta put more seats innem so you doan tefter stann all the time. An aorta have more room innem - you carn tardly move innem air so crairded. Aorta do something about it.'
— Afferbeck Lauder, Let Stalk Strine .

Philosophically, no doubt, it is superficial to say that we have escaped from the works of man to those of Nature when, in fact, smoking a man-made pipe and swinging a man-made stick, wearing our man-made boots and clothes, we pause on a man-made bridge and look down on the banked, narrowed, and deepened river which man has made out of the original wide, shallow, and swampy mess, and across it at a landscape which has only its large geological features in common with that which would have existed if man had never interfered. But we are expressing something we really feel.
— C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

Hence the bewildering nineteenth-century conversations in which speakers define gentleman in purely ethical terms but make it quite clear that at the same moment their idea of a gentleman involves membership in a social class.
— C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

"There's such a thing as loyalty", Jane said. ...
"There is, Ma'am", [McPhee] said. "As you get older, you will learn that it is a virtue too important to be lavished on individual personalities."
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

"When I heard the language of men uttered by my mare," continued Aravis, "I said to myself, the fear of death has disordered my reason and subjected me to delusions. And I became full of shame, because none of my lineage ought to fear death more than the biting of a gnat. Therefore I addressed myself a second time to the stabbing, but Hwin came near to me and put her head between me and the dagger and discoursed to me most excellent reasons and rebuked me as a mother rebukes her daughter. And now my wonder was so great that I forgot about killing myself and about Ahoshta and said, 'O my mare, how have you learned to speak like one of the daughters of men?'"
— C.S. Lewis, The Horse and his Boy

I am a conservative philosopher. Fear not, I don’t mean that I make it my business to glorify the marvellous market and the Republican Party! — What would that have to do with resisting innovation? One thing I do mean is this. I think philosophy has no business challenging the positive convictions of common sense, and no business challenging established results of the natural sciences and mathematics. What should a philosopher do if he discovers a proof that he is the pope? Boldly follow where argument leads?—No, or not unless he’s the philosopher Karol Wojtyła. Instead he should find the flaw in his proof. If he fails, he should conclude that the proof has a flaw he cannot find. The same goes, say I, if a philosopher discovers a proof that some truths are also false; or that motion or time or value or consciousness or freedom is unreal; or that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, or outside the text; or that there are no people, and no swizzle-sticks either; or that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything; or that Cantor’s diagonal argument was fallacious; or that we make worlds with words. We should know a reductio ad absurdum when we see it! It is ever so much more likely that a philosophical argument has gone astray than that any of these things is true.

I am conservative in another way: I oppose revolutions in philosophy. We are plagued by them. Their message is always: Stop it! Put down those tired old questions about mind and body, knowledge, value, freedom, universals, and all. Don’t answer them. Transcend them, debunk them, shake free of them! And then we get some story of how all that bad old philosophy rests on a mistake: how we tried to transcend the limits of experience, how we were bewitched by language, how we aspired to mirror nature, or what not. To me those stories never ring true. The great questions of philosophy, and a host of subordinate questions, are well-posed. Nobody says we have to be curious about them, or anything else for that matter; but if we are curious, we should carry on investigating them. We should try to ignore the interruptions from the stop-it brigade. And we should try not to forget discoveries from before the latest interruption.
— David Lewis, "Acceptance Speech for the Behrman Award" (1991) in Philosophical Manuscripts.

Then my husband served successively as prefect in two separate places, and we devoted all of his salary to purchasing books and writing materials. Whenever we obtained a new book, the two of us would collate together, comparing other editions, then produce a corrected copy with a new title page. When we obtained a calligraphic scroll, painting, or ritual bronze, we would also pore over it to amuse ourselves, identifying any defects we could find. Our custom was to limit ourselves to the duration of one candle per night. In this way, we were able to gather works with a quality of paper and completeness in their texts and brush- work that were superior to those of other collectors. It happens that I have a good memory, and in the evenings after dinner we would sit in our hall named Returning Home and brew tea. We’d point to a pile of books and, choosing a particular event, try to say in which book, which chapter, which page, and which line it was recorded. The winner of our little contest got to drink first. When I guessed right, I’d hold the cup high and burst out laughing until the tea splattered the front of my gown.
— Li Qingzhao (1085-1155) Afterword to Catalogue of Inscriptions on Metal and Stone

As we close it [Boswell's Life of Johnson], the club room is before us, and the table on which stand the omelet for Nugent and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live forever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuffbox and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the ``Why, sir!'', and ``What then, sir!'' and the ``No, sir!'' and the ``You don't see your way through the question, sir!''

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is in his case the most durable. The reputation of those writings which he probably expected to be immortal is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk, the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
— Thomas Macaulay, "Samuel Johnson".

In the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr. Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to 'ride with darkness.' Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.
— Thomas Macaulay, "Southey's Colloquies on Society"

Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognize and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.
— Helen MacDonald, "Introduction", Vesper Flights

The landscapes around us grow emptier and quieter each passing year. We need hard science to establish the rate and scale of these declines, to work out why it is occurring, and what mitigation strategies can be brought into play. But we need literature, too; we need to communicate what the losses mean. I think of the wood warbler, a small citrus-colored bird fast disappearing from British forests. It is one thing to show the statistical facts about this species' decline. It is another thing to communicate to people what wood warblers are, and what that loss means, when your experience of a wood that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers have gone. Literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them.
— Helen MacDonald, "Introduction", Vesper Flights

When I read the news and grieve, my mind has more than once turned to vesper flights, [of swifts] to the strength and purpose that can arise from the collaboration of numberless frail and multitudinous souls. If only we could have seen the clouds that sat like dark rubble on our own horizon for what they were; if only we could have worked together to communicate the urgency of what they would become.
— Helen MacDonald, The Mysterious Life of Birds who Never Come Down in Vesper Flights

The end result of artificial intelligence will be to show that intelligence is impossible, and that the reports of it have been due to experimental error.
— Drew McDermott, in conversation [quoted from memory].

Some people insist that their notations have denotational semantics; others (rather more) can't stand that constraint. In spite of what I am arguing here, I still find myself tempermentally in the first group. If a student comes to me with a denotationless representation, it bothers me. Formerly I thought I had an argument to convince him to rethink, but now all I have is indigestion. The student can always point to his program and claim that it doesn’t draw absurd conclusions from his absurd notation. The fact that I might draw an absurd conclusion is my problem.

To take one of my favorite examples, consider a simple fact like “The Russians have warships deployed off the US coast.” Unless we are willing to resort to “computerdeutsch” predicates like currently_deployed_off_US_coast, a proper representation of something like this will have to express explicitly what the US coast is, roughly how many ships there are and in what distribution they are found, what period of time is implied, and so on and on. But who says that's "proper"? Any particular application program can probably get by with computerdeutsch. And many eager-beaver notation designers will resort to "computerenglisch", such as
    (have Russians (deployed warships (off (coast US))))
which seems even worse to me. But why? If the program works, what’s wrong with it?
— Drew McDermott, "A Critique of Pure Reason"

[A]s to whether the density of [Chomskian] jargon (which I have spared the reader) is deliberately fashioned for an air of profundity, the charge is as unnecessary as it is against the lingo of literary criticism. The jargon accreted gradually and imperceptibly over decades, and is readily comprehensible to practitioners.
— John McWhorter, The Bonfire of Noam Chomsky Vox: The Big Idea September 14, 2016.

We are going farther and farther away from the light at Sinai, yet we do not come any closer to the light of the Messiah.
— Menahem Mendel of Kotzk.

"One who interrupts his learning to say how beautiful is this tree deserves death" --- because he thinks he is interrupting his learning.
— Attributed to Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, interpreting Pirkei Avot 3:7.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, - but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge without Music"

Someone once described Shelley as a beautiful and ineffective angel beating his luminous wings against the void in vain.
Which is certainly describing with might and main.
But probably means that we are all brothers under our pelts.
And that Shelley went around pulling doors marked PUSH and pushing doors marked PULL just like everybody else.
— Ogden Nash, You and Me and P.B. Shelley

Breakfast is a thoroughly inedible repast.
And the dictionary says it is derived from the words break, meaning to break, and fast, meaning a fast, so to breakfast means to break your fast.
Which definition the veriest child could see doesn't check.
Because if the first syllable of breakfast means to break, why is it pronounced brek?
Shame on you, you old lexicographers, I shall call you laxicographers because you have grown very lax.
Because it is perfectly obvious that the first syllable in breakfast is derived from the far-famed Yale football cheer, which is Brekeke-kex, Ko-ax, Ko-ax.

— Ogten Nash, "The Eight O'Clock Peril"

The common belief that we gain "historical perspective" with increasing distance seems to me utterly to misrepresent the actual situation. What we gain is merely confidence in generalizations which we would never dare make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence.
— Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity

Who has heard honey-talk from Finn before strangers, Finn that is wind-quick, Finn that is a better man than God? Or who has seen the like of Finn or seen the living semblance of him standing in the world, Finn that could best God at ball-throw or wrestling or pig-trailing or at the honeyed discourse of sweet Irish with jewels and gold for bards, or at the listening of distant harpers in a black hole at evening? Or where is the living human man who could beat Finn at the making of generous cheese, at the spearing of ganders, at the magic of thumb-suck, at the shaving of hog-hair, or at the unleashing of long hounds from a golden thong in the full chase, sweet-fingered corn-yellow Finn, Finn that could carry an armed host from Almha to Slieve Luachra in the craw of his gut-hung knickers.
— Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

Science: Essentially math disguised as dinosaurs and outer space to try and seem interesting.
— John Oliver, Last Week Tonight July 1, 2018.

The money-god is so cunning. If he only baited his traps with yachts and race-horses, tarts and champagne, how easy it would be to dodge them. It is when he gets at you through your sense of decency that he finds you helpeless. ... He had blasphemed against money, rebelled against money, tried to live like an anchorite outside the money-world; and it had brought him not only misery but also a frightful emptiness, an inescapable sense of futility. To abjure money is to abjure life.
— George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
— George Orwell, "Inside the Whale".

May 19, 1944
'Normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom, about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words ‘civilian bombing’ will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as ‘We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic’. Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

August 4, 1944
Apropos of saturation bombing, a correspondent who disagreed with me very strongly added that he was by no means a pacifist. He recognized, he said, that ‘the Hun had got to be beaten’. He merely objected to the barbarous methods that we are now using.

Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them ‘Huns’. Obviously one does not want to inflict death and wounds if it can be avoided, but I cannot feel that mere killing is all-important. We shall all be dead in less than a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known as ‘natural death’. The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the world as a whole), nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty. By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.
— George Orwell, As I Please
I am not comfortable about these two quotations; in the column that the first is taken from he pretty much endorses bombing civilians. Still, it seems to me that there are important truths here. In any case, I often think of these, particularly in fall 2023.

And if I went inside ... I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!
— George Orwell, "Such, Such were the Joys"

Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
— George Orwell, "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali"

[P]olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets; this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry; this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps; this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

It is fashionable to say that in poetry only the words count and the "meaning" is irrelevant, but in fact every poem contains a prose meaning, and when the poem is any good, it is a meaning that the poet urgently wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda. ...

Mr Eliot speaks also of

the intolerable wrestle
with words and meaning. The poetry does not matter.

Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income.
— George Orwell, "Antisemitism in Britain".

If one has once read Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him.
— George Orwell, "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool."
[For myself, I can't say I find this with Shakespeare, but I do find it with Orwell himself. — ESD]

Galsworthy was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.
— George Orwell, Review of Glimpses and Reflections, by John Galsworthy.

In the shadow of the atomic bomb it is not easy to talk confidently about progress. However, if it can be assumed that we are not going to be blown to pieces in about ten years' time, there are many reasons, and George Gissing's novels are among them, for thinking that the present age is a good deal better than the last one. If Gissing were still alive he would be younger than Bernard Shaw, and yet already the London of which he wrote seems almost as distant as that of Dickens. It is the fog-bound, gas-lit London of the 'eighties, a city of drunken puritans, where clothes, architecture and furniture had reached their rock-bottom of ugliness, and where it was almost normal for a working-class family of ten persons to inhabit a single room. On the whole Gissing does not write of the worst depths of poverty, but one can hardly read his descriptions of lower-middle-class life, so obviously truthful in their dreariness, without feeling that we have improved perceptibly on that black-coated, money-ruled world of only sixty years ago.
— George Orwell, George Gissing (written in 1948; published in 1960).

It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’.
— George Orwell, Raffles and Miss Blandish

For some time nobody spoke. Only Boxer remained on his feet. He fidgeted to and fro, swishing his long black tail against his sides and occasionally uttering a little whinny of surprise. Finally he said:

"I do not understand it. I would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm. It must be due to some fault in ourselves. The solution, as I see it, is to work harder. From now onwards I shall get up a full hour earlier in the mornings."
— George Orwell, Animal Farm

‘Today there are only eighty people in the United Kingdom, with net incomes of over six thousand pounds a year.’ (Mr Quintin Hogg M.P., in his pamphlet The Times We Live In.)

There are also about eighty ways in the English and American languages of expressing incredulity—for example, 'garn', 'come off it', 'you bet', 'sez you', 'oh yeah', 'not half', 'I don’t think', 'less of it' or 'and the pudding!' But I think 'and then you wake up' is the exactly suitable answer to a remark like the one quoted above.
— George Orwell, As I Please, January 19, 1945

The tendencies of an age appear more distinctly in its writers of inferior rank than in those of commanding genius. These latter tell of past and future as well as of the years in which they live. They are for all time. But on the sensitive, responsive souls, of less creative power, current ideals record themselves with clearness. Whoever, then, values literary history will be glad to seek out the gentle and incomplete poet, be willing for a while to dwell dispassionately in his narrow surroundings, without praise or blame will examine his numbered thoughts, and never forget that even restricted times and poets work out necessary elements of human nature and appropriately further its growth. A small writer so studied becomes large.
— George Herbert Palmer, Preface to The English Works of George Herbert.
This is not a typo on my part: The first two names of the author are the same as the name of the subject.
How did I run across this quotation? I don't suppose you care, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I remembered my mother or my father quoting something of the kind, and I wanted to use it in a book review I was writing. I couldn't find it, so I asked my brother Joey. He remembered a similar statement in Isadore Twersky's "Joseph ibn Kaspi: Portrait of a Medieval Jewish Intellectual." Twersky cites Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being; Lovejoy cites Palmer; and Palmer's phrasing is closer to what I had in mind than Lovejoy or Twersky. Which of these my parents might have seen, I don't know; Lovejoy seems the most likely.

Human beings fortify themselves in many ways. Numbness, weakness, irony, inattention, silence, suspicion are only a few of the materials out of which the personality constructs its walls. With experience gained in my siege of Elly, I mount smaller sieges. Each is undertaken with hesitation; to try to help someone is arrogance. But Elly is there to remind me that to fail to try is a dereliction. Not all my sieges are successful. But when I fail, I have learned that I fail because of my own clumsiness and inadequacy, not because the enterprise is impossible. However formidable the fortifications, they can be breached. I have not found one person, however remote, however hostile, who did not wish for what he seemed to fight. Of all the things that Elly has given, the most precious is this faith, a faith that experience has almost transformed into certain knowledge: that inside the strongest citadel he can construct, the human being awaits his besieger.
— Clara Claiborne Park, The Siege

Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seed sown by the young men of '65 and '67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today. Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death: and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.
— Patrick Pearse, Speech at the Grave of O'Donovan Rossa , August 1, 1915.

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:

1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws
2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues
3. Admire themselves for living up to it

Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.
— John Perry, The Art of Procrastination

[T]axes and membership fees are not two ways of framing the same thing: if you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will cease to provide you with its services, but if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail.
— Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, p. 260.
Apropos of George Lakoff's fatuous suggestion that high taxes could be made more politically palatable if they were described as "membership fees".

The main point about Gattling's Limelight Play was, of course, his essential modesty. He was one of the most ignorant and ill-educated men I have ever met, and it was therefore always a particular pleasure to hear him say, to a perfectly ordinary question, "I don't know" slowly, kindly, and distinctly. He was able to indicate, by the tone of his voice, that although he know practically everything about practically everything, and almost everything about this really, yet the mere fact that he knew such a tremendous lot about it made him realise, as we couldn't possibly, that the question was so inextricably two-sided that only a smart-Alec would ever dream of trying to pass judgement either way.
— Stephen Potter, Lifemanship

"Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact," said Granny. "But I don't hold with encouraging it."
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters.

Terrible as were the toil and poverty, the loneliness was worse. ... It is loneliness that "breaks the heart. Loneliness consumes people."
— Sam Rayburn, quoted in The Path to Power by Robert Caro.

On a happier note, every day is designer day for the pacifist superspy. [ Of the TV show, La Femme Nikita ]
— Margy Rochlin, Taking 13 Hours to Fix the Errors made in 90 Minutes, New York Times, Jan. 10, 1999.

The reader who will, throughout this essay on the ambiguity of truth, substitute "butter" for "truth" and "margarine" for "falsehood", will find that the point involved is one which has no special relevance to the nature of truth.
— Bertrand Russell, "Pragmatism" in Philosophical Essays

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present perfect, this must weigh against it.
— Bertrand Russell, "Introduction: On the Value of Skepticism" in Skeptical Essays

Indeed, such inadequacies as we have seemed to find in empiricism have been discovered by strict adherence to a doctrine by which empiricist philosophy has been inspired: that all human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial. To this doctrine we have not found any limitation whatever.
— Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy amoung philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.
— Bertrand Russell, "Socrates", A History of Western Philosophy

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is nether reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second.
— Bertrand Russell, "Heraclitus", A History of Western Philosophy

But even if we suppose that there is such a thing as "wisdom," is there any form of constitution which will give the government to the wise? It is clear that majorities, like general councils, may err, and in fact have erred. Aristocracies are not always wise; kings are often foolish; Popes, in spite of infallibility, have committed grievous errors. Would anybody advocate entrusting the government to university graduates, or even to doctors of divinity? Or to men who, having been born poor, have made great fortunes? It is clear that no legally definable selection of citizens is likely to be wiser, in practice, than the whole body.

It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a suitable training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this would turn out to be a party question

The problem of finding a collection of "wise" men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. This is the ultimate reason for democracy.
— Bertrand Russell, "The Sources of Plato's Opinions" A History of Western Philosophy

[Nietzsche's] opinions of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion toward them, which is obviously one of fear. "Forget not thy whip" — but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.
— Bertrand Russell, "Nietzsche", A History of Western Philosophy

What is our impression of Tevye so far? An indulgent and understanding father, something of a weakling as well. For he could not pretend to himself that he had acted in the best interests of his daughters. Who was to guarantee that either Zeitel or Hodel had character enough to justify their decisions? Love dies, revolutionary ardor fades, the bitter pressure of the world remains.
— Maurice Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleichem

To me it is one of the most horrible of the horrible deeds ascribed to [the Bible's] heroes or its villains: this exuberant killing of an extra hundred Philistines, this exuberant mutilation of an extra hundred corpses, as though the first hundred, the condition of the bargain, were unworthy of the esteem in which David held himself or of his regard for Princess Michal.

... I, who see David as the most passionate of the God-seekers, have never ceased to recoil from it. Almost as much as the murder of Uriah, I juxtapose it with the words so often spoken of David: "For the Lord was with him".

What do these words mean? ... David's career was brilliant in the light of the after ages; to one who wrote shortly after his death it was a mixed thing; and whatever successes he scored were more than offset by failures and by personal wretchedness ... In what sense, then was God with him? In a literal sense that perhaps even the chronicler did not always mean; for the chronicler himself is an evolving figure, and we who interpret him are also chroniclers. God was with David in a terrifically literal sense; for David was possessed, haunted, inhabited, and harassed by God-consciousness. His earthly passions were demonic; equally demonic, if one may so put it, was his anguish over them, and his longing to find himself in God. The heart that could riot in blood-lust and well with self-righteousness, could tremble like a child's before the denunciation of the prophet Nathan, accepting punishment without protest; and it could beat to strains of unearthly music, to give it forth again for our everlasting consolation.
— Maurice Samuel, Certain People of the Book.
[The incident of David killing 200 Philistines and circumcising their corpses is in I Samuel 18:20-27.]

``All great men are bad,'' says Lord Acton flatly. We certainly do not know of anyone who has achieved and maintained wordly greatness without dishonesty, without letting down friends, withing hitting rivals below the belt; and, above all, without instinctively weighing most persons, as and when met, for usefulness in the cause. No matter how noble the cause, this automatic reduction of human beings to functional units is of the essence of badness. No matter, too, how well subordinated the love of power, the need of it for effective worldly action is a corrupting reality which will not disappear from the human scene until the Messianic era.
— Maurice Samuel, Certain People of the Book.

Samuels is slightly misquoting Acton here. The actual quote, from Acton's letter to Bishop Creighton, is "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

He who withdraws completely from the worldly struggle without actually leaving this world does not diminish the volume of the struggle; he only lets his share be taken over.
— Maurice Samuel, Prince of the Ghetto

[I]f a "renegade" Jew is homesick for the Passover as the "renegade" Christian for Christmas, and the two are in these respects equally miserable, there is a particular torment reserved for the Jew at Passover time. He too is surrounded by reminders, but they are of a terrible and ambiguous character. The Passover coincides with the time of the Christian Easter; and in certain lands Easter is the season for whipping up vengeful emotions round the death of Christ. Then the Jew must feel rising all about him that ancient, recurrent annual flood-tide of fury against his people. Let us assume that he has not accepted the Christian faith — he has lost only his Judaism, not his self-respect. Still he must feel he has betrayed someone. For the sake of "intellectual honesty" he is not there, in the beleaguered citadel. For the sake of intellectual honesty he is on the outside, living with safety (at least transient) among the armies of the besiegers.

And then he remembers incidents out of the past. There mingle in his mind poignant recollections of his own childhood seders and the seders of neighbors; the solemnity and the fun, the divinity and the earthliness; parents, brothers, sisters. His mind casts back to the antiquity of the ritual. He thinks of seders in other climes, celebrants in other costumes; and with the seders he remembers the lowering, threatening world outside.
— Maurice Samuel, Prince of the Ghetto

Sometimes you will hear a worshipper gabble off the words "BLESSEDaretheythatdwellinThyhousetheyshallpraiseTheeforeverselah!" He begins with a shout and trains off into a subdued drumfire of amazingly precise syllabification, right to the end of the psalm, coming up now and again with an occasional outburst of intelligibility, or pausing here and there for a roulade. You would swear that the man's mind is not on the words — and it is not. Then you would add that his prayer is perfunctory, and you would more often than not be quite wrong. His soul is in the posture of prayer; he may be in the mood of supplication, of adoration, or of humility; he is using the occasion of the common gesture for a private experience; the familiar syllabic exercise is a kind of hypnotic induction. Davenning is therefore the periodic contact with the religious emotion rather than the formal act of prayer.
— Maurice Samuel, Prince of the Ghetto

Remember in our favor the bond with our ancestors as You have said, "And I shall remember my bond with Jacob, and also my bond with Isaac and I shall also remember my bond with Abraham, and I will remember the land."
Remember in our favor the bond with our earliest ancestors as You have said, "And I will remember in their favor the bond with their earliest ancestors, that I took them out of the land of Egypt in the eyes of the nations to be God for them; I am the Lord."
Do with us as You have promised us, as You have said, "And even so, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or despise them to destroy them and to break My bond with them, for I am the Lord their God."
Reverse our captivity and have mercy on us, as it is written, "And the Lord your God will reverse your captivity and have mercy on you, and He will return and gather you in from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you."
Gather our exiles as it is written, "If your exiles are dispersed to the ends of the heavens, the Lord your God will gather you from there and will take you from there."
Annul our crimes as the mist and the cloud as it is written, "I will anull your crimes as the mist and your sins as the cloud; return to Me for I have redeemed you."
Annul our crimes for Your own sake, as You have said, "I, I am He who annuls your crimes for My own sake, and I shall not remember your sins."
Whiten our sins as snow and as fleece, as it is written, " `Come, let us deliberate,' says the Lord, `If your sins be like crimson, they will be whitened like snow; if they are red as dyed wool they will become like fleece.' "
Throw pure water on us and purify us, as it is written, "And I will throw pure water on you and you will be pure; I will purify you from all your impurities and corruptions."
Have mercy on us and do not destroy us, as it is written, "For the Lord your God is a merciful God; He will not destroy you and will not annihilate you and He will not forget the bond with your ancestors which He swore to them."
Open our hearts to love Your name, as it is written, "And the Lord your God will open your heart and the hearts of your descendants to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul for the sake of your life."
Let us find You when we seek You, as it is written, "And from there you shall seek the Lord your God and you shall find Him, if you search for Him with all your heart and with all your soul."
Bring us to Your holy mountain and gladden us in Your house of prayer, as it is written, "And I shall bring them to My holy mountain and I shall gladden them in My house of prayer; their sacrifices and offerings will be accepted on My altar; for My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations."
— Selihot liturgy.

[The quotations are from Leviticus 26:42, 26:45, 26:44; Deuteronomy 30:3, 30:4; Isaiah 44:22, 43:25, 1:18; Ezekiel 36:25; Deuteronomy 4:31, 30:6, 4:29; and Isaiah 56.7. In some traditions (nuscha'ot) the verses are in a different order. I don't know which nusach this particular prdering is from.]

It is possible to define a person's interest in such a way that no matter what he does he can be seen to be furthering his own interests in every isolated act of choice.
— Amartya Sen, Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory, Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1976.

De alterius vita, de alterius morte disputatis et ad nomen magnorum ob aliquam eximiam laudent virorum, sicut ad occursum ignotorum hominum minuti canes, latratis ; expedit enim vobis neminem videri bonum, quasi aliena virtus exprobratio delictorum vestrum omnium sit. (You argue about the life and death of another, and yelp at the name of men whom some peculiarly noble quality has rendered great, just as tiny curs do at the approach of strangers: for it is to your interest that no one should appear to be good, as if virtue in another were a reproach to all your crimes.)
— Seneca, De Vita Beata (Of the Happy Life)
I got this from a Zoom comment by John Sidles at a seminar. He got it from a sermon by Isaac Barrow.

A week ago, when I had finished
Writing the chapter you've just read
And, with avidity undiminished
Was charting out the course ahead,
An editor — at a plush party
(Well-wined, -provisioned, speechy, hearty)
Hosted by (long live!) Thomas Cook
Where my Tibetan travel book
Was honored — seized my arm: "Dear fellow,
What's your next work?" "A novel ..." "Great!
We hope that you, dear Mr. Seth —"
"... In verse," I added. He turned yellow.
"How marvellously quaint," he said,
And subsequently cut me dead.
— Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate, 5.1.

MORELL: Eugene, my boy: you are making a fool of yourself — a very great fool of yourself. There's a piece of wholesome plain speaking for you.

MARCHBANKS. Oh, do you think I don't know all that? Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? [Morell's gaze wavers for the first time. He instinctively averts his face and stands listening, startled and thoughtful.] They are more true: they are the only things that are true. You are very calm and sensible and moderate with me because you can see that I am a fool about your wife; just as no doubt that old man who was here just now is very wise over your socialism, because he sees that YOU are a fool about it. [Morell's perplexity deepens markedly. Eugene follows up his advantage, plying him fiercely with questions.] Does that prove you wrong? Does your complacent superiority to me prove that I am wrong?

— George Bernard Shaw, Candida.

CANDIDA. Wouldn't you like to present me with a new [scrubbing brush] with an ivory back inlaid with mother-of-pearl?

MARCHBANKS [softly and musically but sadly and longingly] No, not a scrubbing brush but a boat: a tiny shallop to sail away in, far away from the world, where the marble floors are washed by the rain and dried by the sun; where the south wind dusts the beautiful green and purple carpets. Or a chariot! to carry us up into the sky, where the lamps are stars and don't need to be filled with parafin oil every day.

MORELL [harshly] And where there is nothing to do but to be idle, selfish, and useless.

CANDIDA [jarred] Oh James! How could you spoil it all?

MARCHBANKS [firing up] Yes, to be idle, selfish, and useless: that is, to be beautiful, free and happy; hasnt every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves?

— George Bernard Shaw, Candida.

[In Hard Times, Dickens] begins at last to exercise quite recklessly his power of presenting a character to you in the most fantastic and outrageous terms, putting into its mouth from one end of the book to the other hardly one word that could conceivably be uttered by any sane human being, and yet leaving you with an unmistakeable and exactly truthful portrait of a character that you will recognize at once as not only real but typical.

— George Bernard Shaw, "Introduction to Hard Times".

She sat inches from the television screen, ready to point out this or that moment of action or expression, an emotion passing over Jeni's face, a variation in one step or another, and interpreting everything she saw with that sharpness of insight I felt I lacked, that I considered, at this point, Tracey's possession alone. A gift for seeing that seemed to have its only outlet and expression here, in my living room, in front of my television, and which no teacher ever saw, and no exam ever managed to successfully register or even note, and of which, perhaps, these memories are the only true witness and record.
— Zadie Smith, Swing Time

Gratitude isn't an emotion. But the expectation of gratitude is a very lively one.
— C.P. Snow, The Masters chap. 25.

Why won't they see what matters? I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
— C.P. Snow, The Masters

And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
— Gary Snyder Axe Handles

The best ones are the small ones,
those you need to hold in your hand
two or three at a time, those you need
to feel for size, and shape, and heft,
the blunt, the sharp, the smooth,
the rough, the square, the round,
the firm, the soft, the ones like rocks,
like bricks or stones in streams,
the ones like clods of soil or clumps
of clay, the ones you pile to build
the whole world with, and then
the ones you hurl to bring it down.
— J. R. Solonche, Monosyllabic

There was, had he looked, a sadder sight beside him, the no longer quite human faces of the afflicted girls [the accusers in the Salem witch trials]. Seven months of carefully cultivated hysteria had not improved these flowers of Puritan maidenhood. They had coarsened and toughened and become nearly as insensible to normal feeling as so many automata. People who shrank from the cruelty of their jests at the dying misjudged them, for they were no more capable of conscious cruelty than of any other really human feeling. The very violence of their apparent emotion disguised a sick inner apathy. Given over so long to a world of dark fantasy, they were no longer capable of response to the electric shock of reality.

... They were famous; they were powerful; no one in Massachussetts had such power over life and death as they. But they were also alone. They created a little lifeless vacuum about them wherever they moved. ...

They did not mind, for they lived in a dream, their senses so spellbound that they did not know how bad a dream it was, how stale with repetition, without the interpolation of a fresh idea since they had fallen into it. They went on and on in the old bad dream, responding to suggestion as insensately as a machine responds to the touch of a hand.

— Marion Starkey, The Devil In Massachusetts.

It's like when people say Bob Dylan changed the world in the '60s. He wrote some good tunes, and some people who did actually end up changing the world probably hummed them a lot, but that's not what changed the world.
— Jon Stewart, interview in New York Magazine, November 3, 2014.

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field ... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. 'Archbishop Clegthorpe? Of course! The inevitable capstone to a career in veterinary medicine!'
— Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Dotty (off): HELP!

Archie: It's all right — just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call `a cry for help'.

Bones: But it was a cry for help.

Archie: Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. All exhibitionism is a cry for help, but a cry for help as such is only exhibitionism.
— Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

In what resides the most characteristic virtue of humanity? In good works? Possibly. In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps. But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment. To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the personal and the particular, none ever practised with a more consummate success the divine art of impartiality. And certainly to have no axe to grind is something very noble and very rare. It may be said to be the antithesis of the bestial. A series of creatures might be constructed, arranged according to their diminishing interest in the immediate environment, which would begin with the amoeba and end with the mathematician. In pure mathematics the maximum of detachment appears to be reached: the mind moves in an infinitely complicated pattern, which is absolutely free from temporal considerations. Yet this very freedom—the essential condition of the mathematician's activity—perhaps gives him an unfair advantage. He can only be wrong—he cannot cheat. But the metaphysician can. The problems with which he deals are of overwhelming importance to himself and the rest of humanity; and it is his business to treat them with an exactitude as unbiased as if they were some puzzle in the theory of numbers. That is his business—and his glory. In the mind of a Hume one can watch at one's ease this super-human balance of contrasting opposites—the questions of so profound a moment, the answers of so supreme a calm. And the same beautiful quality may be traced in the current of his life, in which the wisdom of philosophy so triumphantly interpenetrated the vicissitudes of the mortal lot.
— Lytton Strachey, "Hume", Portraits in Miniature

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods ?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods ?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
— Algernon Swinburne, from "Hymn to Proserpine"

The subject of today's investigation
Is things that don't move by themselves.
— Wislawa Szymborska, A Little Girl Tugs At the Tablecloth

I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
— Wislawa Szymborska, Map

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
— Wislawa Szymborska, The Joy of Writing

Last January, Gene Weingarten, a Washington Post columnist, persuaded the violinist Joshua Bell to join him in an experiment. Bell was to dress in jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, position himself at the head of the escalator in the L'Enfant Plaza subway station at the height of the morning rush hour, open his violin case, take out his $3.5 million Stradivarius, launch into Bach's D-minor Chaconne for solo violin, and see what happened. ...

The fulfillment of the self-fulfilling prophecy gave Weingarten the pretext he sought, in an article titled "Pearls Before Breakfast," to cluck and tut, to quote Kant and Tocqueville, and to carry on as if now we knew what really happened at Abu Ghraib. ...

My hat goes off to one Ben H., a netizen who saw through it all. "Perhaps the Post could do a whole series of articles about philistines ignoring Joshua Bell's sublime music-making in different locations," he suggested:

1. Outside a burning building (not one fireman stopped to listen!)
2. At a car crash site (one paramedic actually pushed him aside!)
3. During a graduation exam (shushed by the invigilators!)
4. At a school play (thrown out by angry parents!)
5. On an airport runway (passing jet liners seemed oblivious!)

When one state is completely dependent on another, it is the weaker that can call the tune; it can threaten to collapse unless supported, and its protector has no answering threat to return.
— A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe pp. 29-30 (a propos of the Papal States and France under Louis Napoleon).

Historians do a bad day's work when they write the appeasers off as stupid or as cowards. They were men confronted with real problems, doing their best in the circumstances of their time.
— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War

Twenty years ago there was still living at Blérancourt a great-niece of St. Just, who would show to the visitor a few relics of her ``poor Uncle Anthony.'' That was all he was to her. But can history, after all, say anything truer about him? There are a few men who seem to be masters of their destiny, and to out-top their times. They must be described as the public knew them. Their portraits must be painted full-length, in uniform and orders, sword and cocked hat, framed in a foot of gilt, and hung on the line in the big room of history. They have ceased to belong to themselves: they belong to the nation. They have ceased even to be themselves: they have become something else that they thought better. It would be improper for history to represent them in undress, or off their guard. The public would not recognize them: they would hardly know themselves.

But it is not to those pictures that we go even for the best examples of an artist: he has not been able, or has not been allowed, to get behind the conventional figure of his sitter. If we want art, if we want life, if we want the portrayal of character, we are more likely to find it in the ``portrait of an unknown gentleman'' that the artist painted for the love of his subject, not for cash; or in the likenesses of those who were the victims rather than the masters of their destiny. They may have ruined their causes, they may have sacrificed their lives, but they did not lose themselves. We need show them no conventional deference. We can treat them on the only footing that is proper between man and man — one of friendly understanding and fellow feeling. And that is the fittest medium of historical portraiture.

Poor Uncle Anthony! ``I have done badly,'' he had written; ``but I shall be able to do better.'' He had made that the rule of his life. He had sent away his mistress, and forsworn women. He had atoned for the robbery of his home by public incorruptibility. The writer of indecent verse had become the preacher of a virtuous republic. Only, through it all he had kept, as a symbol of his unalterable pride, the smart coat and the high collar. They had been through strange experiences — battles and executions, committees and speeches, cruel attacks and heroic defenses, flattery and hatred, success suddenly changed into failure. To leap to fame at twenty-three, and die in infamy at twenty-seven — that was his career. There was no one with more to give to his country — youth, courage, ability, and enthusiasm: yet there was not one of its instruments that the blind force of the Revolution more contemptuously used, and broke, and flung aside.

— J.M. Thompson, Leaders of the French Revolution, 1948.

[I do not at all endorse this as a view of Antoine St. Just, who, from everything I have ever seen, including most of this essay, was a horrible, murderous, totalitarian avant la lettre, whose death on the guillotine was much less to be regretted than the thousands of innocent victims for whose deaths he was in part responsible. I cannot imagine how J.M. Thompson could view him with "fellow feeling". But, ignoring the particular subject, the passage seems to me very moving. Certainly, it stuck in my mind quite clearly over a period of three decades, between the time that I lost the book moving to graduate school and the time in 2011 when I recalled it at the library to look up this passage.

As regards the sardonic description of the "great man" in the first paragraph, it is probably relevant that Thompson's previous book was a biography of Napoleon. — ESD]

At present, our houses are cluttered and defiled with it [furniture], and a good housewife would sweep the greater part into the dust hole and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.
— H.D. Thoreau, Walden

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the rails by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come, and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed by that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion that covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.
— H.D. Thoreau, Walden

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
— Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations

"Do you remember that bit of rabbit, Mr. Frodo?" he said. "And our place under the warm bank in Captain Faramir's country, the day I saw an oliphaunt?"

"No, I am afraid not, Sam," said Frodo. "At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

"But I say to you, King of the Númenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive."
— J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen," The Return of the King, Appendix A.

During the night, A, though sleeping with B, dreams of C. C stands at the furthest extremity or (if the image is considered two-dimensionally) the apogee of a curved driveway, perhaps a dream-refraction of the driveway of the house that had once been their shared home. Her figure, though small in the perspective, is vivid, clad in a tomato-red summer dress; her head is thrown back, her hands are on her hips, and her legs have taken a wide, confident stance. She is flaunting herself, perhaps laughing; his impression is of intense, female vitality. He awakes troubled. The sleep of B beside him is not disturbed; she rests in the certainty that A loves her. Indeed, he has left C for her, to prove it.

PROBLEM: Which has he more profoundly betrayed, B or C?
— John Updike, "Problems", New Yorker, November 3, 1975.

Liute und lant dar inn ich von kinde bin erzogen
die sint mir worden frömde als ob ez sî gelogen.
(The people and the land in which I was raised from childhood have become strange to me as if it were all a lie.)
— Walther von der Vogelweide, Alterselegie

Boswell was thirty years younger than Johnson, and this gap, which in itself is not so very great, turned out by an accident of historical pattern to be all-important. If Johnson had been born in 1680 and Boswell in 1710, the difference between them would merely have been the difference between youth and middle age; but since Johnson's birth date was 1709 and Boswell's 1740, they are separated by one of those seismic cracks in the historical surface. Boswell is a new man in Johnson's world; he belongs to the epoch of Rousseau; all the attitudes that we associate with the end of the eighteenth century — the onset of "sensibility", the obsession with the individual and the curious, the swelling side of subjective emotion — are strongly present in him. Where Johnson still belongs to the world of Aristotle and Aquinas, the world of the giant system-builders, Boswell inhabits the ruins of that world. Where Johnson instinctively proceeds by erecting a framework and then judging the particular instance in relation to that framework, Boswell is the sniffing bloodhound who will follow the scent of individuality into whatever territory it leads him. The fascination of their dialogue, that dialogue of mind, heart and voice round which Boswell organized his great Life, is that it is not merely between two very different men but between two epochs. In its pages, Romantic Europe speaks to Renaissance Europe, and is answered.
— John Wain, Samuel Johnson: A Biography

Whan that Junne with hys sunshyn soote
The Capitol hath dazzled to the roote
And blossoms bloome on the cherry,
Then folk break in and bugge Waterbury.

...

Thys was the merrye crew, on TV eache.
And who can say if cumen in impeache?
Nor yet whych man will ansyr to what cryme?
No oon can know, at Thysse Poynt in Tyme.
— Judith Wax, The Waterbury Tales.
This pastiche of Chaucer is a brilliant satire of the cast of characters in Watergate. Too long to quote in full — look it up at the link.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

She wailed a wail that meant the abandonment of the universe, the universe we build for ourselves and one another with such hard work for all our lives together, constructing and reconstructing the world of things as they are. It was a howl from a place where nothing is true, where nothing is the way things are. I see now what it was, what I felt then, though then I could only feel it: the horror of a world without supports — for me, for her, or for any of us. The horror of the unbuilding of everything.
— Jonathan Weiner, His Brother's Keeper

As the years went by and age overtook her [Katharine White], there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion — the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
— E.B. White, Introduction to Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine White.

At Cordova, we received by radio the news of Harding’s death, and I copied into my journal the notice on the ship’s bulletin board:

SAN FRANCISCO

President Warren G. Harding died here tonight at 7:30 o’clock. He was stricken without any warning. Mrs. Harding was with him at the last. See the second steward about your laundry.

``Here'', I wrote in pensive vein, ``is a very fine illustration of how the world jogs on, come what may.” Apparently the realization that people would continue to have their dirty clothes washed after the death of Warren Gamaliel Harding struck me forcibly.
— E.B. White "By the Sea"

Politics is all that stands between power and cruelty.
— Leon Wieseltier, "After Nobility", The New Republic, October 6, 2011.

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.
— Richard Wilbur, "The House"

Misfortunes one can endure — they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults — ah! —- there is the sting of life.
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan.

To understand that, as conservatives must, is to put yourself into the intolerable position of looking into the face of a man suffering the worst kind of injustice and tyranny and then explaining: "It’s horrible, of course, but it just isn’t practical at the moment to relieve your inhuman suffering. Maybe in four years, after the next election."
— Kevin Williamson, "The End of the GOP", National Review, January 12, 2021.

...

They say that she's sunken, they say that she fell
From the narrow and virtuous path,
But her formal French gardens are sunken as well
And so is her pink marble bath.

— Ruth and Eugene Willis "We Never Mention Aunt Clara" See here for the authorship.

I always think there's a band, kid.
—Meredith Wilson, The Music Man

This is how our children learn sums; for one makes them put down three beans and then another three beans and then count what is there. If the result at one time were 5, at another 7 (say because, as we should now say, one sometimes got added and one sometimes vanished of itself), then the first thing we said would be that beans were no good for teaching sums. But if the same thing happened with sticks, fingers, lines and most other things, that would be the end of all sums.

"But shouldn’t we then still have 2+2=4?"
" — This sentence would have become unusable."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notes on the Foundations of Mathematics

As a general rule, in my dealings with the delicately-nurtured, I am the soul of knightly chivalry — suave, genial, and polished. But I can on occasion say the bitter, cutting thing, and I said it now.

"Oh," I said.

— P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves and the Kid Clementina", Very Good, Jeeves!

[Note: Somewhere P.G. Wodehouse repeats this joke, with a similar build up, but with the punchline " `Oh,' I said and I meant it to sting." But I haven't been able to find this again. Apparently the following is from Right Ho, Jeeves: “‘Very good,” I said coldly. ‘In that case, tinkerty tonk.’ And I meant it to sting.”— ESD]

"It is a recognized fact, sir, that there is nothing that so satisfactorily unites individuals who have been so unfortunate as to quarrel amongst themselves as a strong mutual dislike for some definite person. ... Remembering this, it occurred to me that were you, sir, to be established as the person responsible for the ladies and gentlemen being forced to spend the night in the garden, everybody would take so strong a dislike to you that in this common sympathy they would sooner or later come together."

I would have spoken, but he continued.

"And such proved to be the case. All, as you see, sir, is now well. After your departure on the bicycle, the various estranged parties agreed so heartily in their abuse of you that the ice, if I may use the expression, was broken, and it was not long before Mr Glossop was walking beneath the trees with Miss Angela, telling her anecdotes of your career at the university in exchange for hers regarding your childhood, while Mr Fink-Nottle, leaning against the sun-dial, held Miss Bassett enthralled with stories of your school-days."
— P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips, and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.
— W.B. Yeats The Song of Wandering Aengus

Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defense, a continual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion.
— W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time.

וְהִזָּהֲרוּ בְּזָקֵן שֶׁשָּׁכַח תַּלְמוּדוֹ מֵחֲמַת אוֹנְסוֹ. דְּאָמְרִינַן: לוּחוֹת וְשִׁבְרֵי לוּחוֹת מוּנָּחוֹת בָּאָרוֹן.
Be careful [to be respectful] of an elder who has forgotten their former knowledge due to circumstances beyond their control. As it is said, ``Both the intact and the broken tablets [of the Ten Commandments] were placed in the Ark of the Covenant.''
— Yehoshua ben Levi, Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 8b

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
— Lin Yutang, quoted in Hard-to-Solve Cryptograms by Derrick Niederman, p. 96

Zuangzi and Huizi were strolling one day on the bridge over the River Hao. Zhaungzi observed, "See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That's what fish really enjoy!"

"You are not a fish," said Huizi, "How do you know what fish enjoy?"

"You are not I," replied Zhuangzi, "so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

— Zhuangzi