Notable Quotable 351

Nov 29, 2024

It is not the fear of death which creates the desire for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes the fear of death.

- Otto Weininger

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

- Erich Fromm

Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth.

- Leo Tolstoy

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.

- Terence McKenna

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.

- St. Augustine

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They proved that it was possible to produce beauty in life by surrounding life with beauty. They discovered that symmetrical bodies were built by souls continuously in the presence of symmetrical bodies; that noble thoughts were produced by minds surrounded by examples of mental nobility.

Conversely, if a man were forced to look upon an ignoble or asymmetrical structure it would arouse within him a sense of ignobility which would provoke him to commit ignoble deeds. If an illproportioned building were erected in the midst of a city there would be ill-proportioned children born in that community; and men and women, gazing upon the asymmetrical structure, would live inharmonious lives.

Thoughtful men of antiquity realised that their great philosophers were the natural products of the æsthetic ideals of architecture, music, and art established as the standards of the cultural systems of the time.

- Manly P. Hall

Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.

- Richard John Neuhaus

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

- Herbert Spencer

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

- Jose Saramago

History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.

- Victor Davis Hanson