Notable Quotable 94

Jul 22, 2023

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.

- Tom Waits

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

- W.B. Yeats

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

- Thomas Jefferson

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

- Aristotle

Ideology, like every other weapon deployed in the quest for supremacy, is only a means to power. It is never the goal; it has no other sanctity except as a weapon.

During the power struggle, like other weapons, ideology too takes a lot of hits and may be disfigured beyond recognition.

- R. N. Prasher

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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces ‘nice’ people, not heroes.

- Peter Kreeft

It is extremely improbable that we have suddenly become better and smarter than our predecessors. In fact, what has happened is that we have lost the ability to understand functional social patterns other than markets and bureaucracies. The result is that the past appears irrational, our society is plagued by dysfunctions we cannot understand or deal with, and we treat our own blindness and stupidity as the triumph of virtue and enlightenment.

- James Kalb

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

- G.K. Chesterton

Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilisation are the only people by whom civilisation is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.

- C.S. Lewis