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An appeal to principles is the condition of any considerable reconstruction of society, because social institutions are the visible expression of the scale of moral values which rules the minds of individuals, and it is impossible to alter institutions without altering that moral valuation.

In painting, in poetry and the literary arts in general, the balance between originality and tradition is a very uneasy one. If, in the work of an artist, we see clear references to the work of his predecessors, we are likely to dismiss him as derivative. In science, unless we see that a man knows and respects what his forerunners have produced, we are inclined to find him unconvincing and ignorant.

Some of us reject both the cries of enmity that reach our ears from one side and the tender solicitations that come to us from the other. Between these two extremes, we are searching for the just voice that will give us truth without shame. For that we do not need to be absolutely clear about everything; we need only to desire clarity with passion and intellect and heart…

Finished products are for decadent minds.

The men of the Resistance took a silent oath to hold out if tortured. That oath was necessary. If it was never openly pronounced, it was because everyone was aware that pain has its limits, and before being subjected to torture no man knows whether he will prove to be a coward or not. That is why this oath was one that each resistor took in solitude, to himself alone.

Nothing is given to mankind, and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust deaths. But man’s grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way to overcome it, which is to be just himself.

Orwell once said that we “we could do with a little less talk of ‘capitalist’ and ‘proletarian’ and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

“There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation is work for second-rate minds.”

Way to scare off a review on Goodreads. Kudos, Hardy. Kudos.

Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt.
-Iblis Ginjo

(Like the quote but I think this is taken from Jung)

Well, if any aliens land on Earth, there’ll be lots of legal problems! Do they pay taxes? Can they be drafted? Should they receive diplomatic immunity?

Issue 28: Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!

Your Honor, before this trial begins, my client wishes to file a counter-charge against the entire human race!

You’re out of order, counselor! The bench will entertain no such motions until this trial has ended!

Issue 7: In Mortal Combat with… Sub-Mariner!

A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and it’s ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.

There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.

Keynes stared at him, seeing the water-fat flesh. He spoke coldly: “You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.”

In modern civilized life, with its artificial light, these phases are of slight importance, but in ancient times, in climates where the days are burning and the skies clear, human life was apparently largely influenced by the existence of moonlight.

Arleen remembered when they used to take a break from doing evictions around Christmastime in Milwaukee. But they did away with that in 1991, after a landlord convinced the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that the practice was an unfair religious celebration.

At two or three o’clock in the morning, the moon is always expressing something deep, calm, and tender…

Now, the essence of coordinate geometry is the identification of the algebraic correlation with the geometrical locus.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Somebody once said that the library is actually the dominant life form on the planet. Humans simply exist as the reproductive means to achieve more libraries.

Natural science wants man to learn, religion wants him to act.

It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late, when the means of observation have become too perfect.

In other words, the axioms of geometry (I do not speak of those of arithmetic) are only definitions in disguise. What, then, are we to think of the question: Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false; [...] One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

It is language that tells us the essence of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own essence. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

It is time to break the habit of overestimating philosophy and of thereby asking too much of it. What is needed in the present world crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter.

The liberation of language from grammar into a more essential framework is reserved for thought and poetic creation.

[N]ature gets credit for which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for its song: the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and turn them into odes of self-congratulation [to] the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.

The Platonic world of ideas is the refined, revised form of the Pythagorean doctrine that number lies at the base of the real world. Owing to the Greek mode of representing numbers by patterns of dots, the notions of number and of geometrical configuration are less separated than with us.