Notable Quotable 202

Feb 07, 2024

I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of […] elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. "High modernism" seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries.

- James C. Scott

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

- Francis Bacon

He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

- Richard Francis Burton

To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to bea friend can be lethal.

- Henry Kissinger

We will be safer from terrorist attack only when we have earned the respect of all other nations instead of their fear, respect for our values and not merely our weapons.

- Theodore C. Sorensen

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We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

- Audre Lorde

Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were, indeed, the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.

- Edmund Burke

A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.

- St. Francis of Assisi

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

- Henry Miller

It is vain to seek the company of wicked men in the hope of doing them good; we are far more likely to be corrupted by them. It is not enough to forsake the foolish, we must join those that walk in wisdom.

- Matthew Henry