Chuck LoPresti

“Just as gold shines forth when the lazy slag has been melted away, so too does the departed stand transfigured before our eyes after sloughing off the bodily husk; in the night of death, we make out constellations that we failed to see, or neglected, in the daytime of life.”
― Dr. Mises, Stapelia Mixta

“Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late. You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted. You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you—you, officers of the Crown, all of you. And so you made yourselves into the Mamelukes of a man who carries on his head responsibility for a hundred thousand murders and who is the cause of the sorrow and the object of the curses of the whole of the world.
And now you are betraying him, as yesterday you betrayed the Republic, and as the day before yesterday you betrayed the Monarchy.
[...]
For years, these men were the cover for every treasonable act, every orgy of rape and murder, because Hitler allowed them prominence once again in a debased, Prussianised Germany. They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts, they went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, and they hummed a little tune to words like ‘Germany’ or the ‘German spirit’, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power...
And now that the firm is going bankrupt, they are betraying it to provide themselves with a political alibi— just as they betrayed all the others who were no longer useful in their drive to get and hold power.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?”
― René Daumal

“Some of ours is so crooked they can't lay in a birth only when the trains making a curve.”
― Ring Lardner, Lardner on Baseball