Notable Quotable 201

Feb 06, 2024

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic—she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic—she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic—she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favors. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.

- C.S. Lewis

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.

- Mark Twain

Men's minds, once unbalanced, are ready to believe anything.

- Tacitus

There is nothing permanent except change.

- Heraclitus

It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

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You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

- Robert Anton Wilson

There is no substitute for victory.

- Douglas MacArthur

One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It’s hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It’s implicit.

- Cliff James, Of Bodies Changed

It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.

- Etienne de La Boetie

Deliberate, therefore, on this new national government with coolness; analize it with criticism; and reflect on it with candor: if you find that the influence of a powerful few, or the exercise of a standing army, will always be directed and exerted for your welfare alone, and not to the aggrandizement of themselves, and that it will secure to you and your posterity happiness at home, and national dignity and respect from abroad, adopt it; if it will not, reject it with indignation-better to be where you are for the present, than insecure forever afterwards.

- Cato I, Anti-Federalist