Notable Quotable 270

May 13, 2024

The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.

- Robert Nisbet

As between individuals, without a common idea there can be no true unity between peoples, and this common idea must be placed as highly as possible so that it can be seen from far around. By putting it too low, under the pretense of making it more accessible, it degrades the best, and only acknowledges the mediocre in their mediocrity. A high idea does not need to be understood by every citizen in order to be taken part of; it is enough for it to be in the air as it acts both directly and indirectly on our consciences.

- Georges Bernanos

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about themselves, and small people talk about others.

- John C. Maxwell

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

- Harry S. Truman

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

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Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

- Einstein

Our lives have become wall-to-wall uncertainty…The main institutions of our society have abdicated their role for public-spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise. What you are having—what you are seeing—is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they are realizing that these institutions lie to people that they never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with. You are seeing a complete destruction of reality unless they were physically there…Nobody has an answer.

- Eric Weinstein

An evil enemy will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.

- Sun Tzu

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.

- Salman Rushdie

If people can’t control their own emotions then they have to start to control other people’s behavior.

- John Cleese