Notable Quotable #10

Aug 27, 2022

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."

- Eric Hughes, 1993

"The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The people of Maine and Texas, of England and India, could never become enemies or be involved in strife and war, save through the intervention of human government to spread enmity and excite to war. Individuals in contact might, through conflict of interest, or personal antipathy, become embittered, and engage in war with each other, but distinct nations or peoples could have no strife save as they should be excited and carried on by these human governments.”

- David Lipscomb

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”

- H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (Kindle, paperback)

“He was a very different and distasteful type … obviously, second-rate, who poured forth all the cheap and shoddy propaganda on race teaching, etcetera. We could get nowhere with him because to every question we asked, there came a kind of gramophone record reply.”

- E. Amy Buller, Darkness over Germany

“I’m not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I'm going to take a stand. I'm going to defend it, right or wrong, I'm going to defend it.”

- Cameron Frye, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off