Notable Quotable 175

Jan 01, 2024

The desire to please a crowd means that principle is let slip, and conscience ceases to be the standard of action. His very friends are not true friends, being mostly of the fair-weather quality... We drift into many of our connections with men, but the art of seamanship is tested by sailing not by drifting. The subject of the choice of friendship is not advanced much by just letting them choose us. That is to become the victim, not the master of our circumstances.

- Hugh Black, Friendship (1898)

So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.

- Malcolm Muggeridge

Evil always takes advantage of ambiguity.

- G.K. Chesterton

If we become stiffnecked in our afflictions and do not confess that we are the cause of these and are worthy to suffer things even greater; if instead we blame other men, sometimes the demons, sometimes even God’s justice; if we maintain that we are innocent of such deeds; and if we continue to think and say this without comprehending that God knows and understands more than we, that “in all the earth are His judgments,” and that a man is not chastened unless He gives His command: then everything that comes upon us will cause us constant sorrow, our tribulations will become very vehement, and we shall be handed over from one to another as in a chain.

- St. Isaac the Syrian

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

- Soren Kierkegaard

Strike.Me

Buy Me a Coffee

There is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another.

- Voltairine de Cleyre

The glory of wealth and physical beauty is fluid and fragile; but virtue is held brilliant and eternal.

- Sallust

As Orwell so succinctly put it, ‘The farther a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.' Man has drifted far, indeed. There is simply no place for the hard, objective truth in this world, and for those who insist upon speaking it regardless, little—if any—grace is afforded. In man’s abundance of sinful pride, he has come to believe himself to be infallible in thought and deed. To be proven wrong is to therefore be proven imperfect, thus contradicting his perceived infallibility. For this reason, every topic on the table of public discourse seems to lead not to rational, intentional, and thoughtful discourse, but rather to virulent, vitriolic, and hostile aggression. We walk on eggshells in our Lord of the Flies society, lest we step out of line and end up with our heads on pikes.

- Jeremy Kee

It's better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right

- Mark Twain

The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.

- Paul Sigmac