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...Jessie and Bluebell had both whelped...giving birth between them to nine sturdy puppies. As soon as they were weaned Napoleon took them away from their mothers, saying that he would make himself responsible for their education. He took them up into a loft which could only be reached by a ladder from the harness-room, and there kept them in such seclusion that the rest of the farm soon forgot their existence.

The focus of Louis’s thesis was the growing native-born Chinese population, which in the 1920 census accounted for 30 percent of the total [number in the US]…The culture and the values of their parents collided with that of the country of their birth, a conflict familiar to European immigrants, but the Chinese Americans there was the added complication of race…The result was a kind of psychic homelessness.

In the aftermath of the [1906 San Francisco] quake, anti-Chinese zealots celebrated the destruction of Chinatown, believing they could finally cleanse the Chinese stain from the city. The Oakland Enquirer suggested that every town in the region could seize the opportunity to ‘do away with the huddling together of Chinese in districts where it is undesirable.’

…bullets rained down on the miners, and ‘one by one the Chinamen were shot down like sheep-killing dogs.’ The outlaws chased after a lone survivor and ‘finished him off’ with a rock. Afterward, the white assailants threw the mangled bodies into the river…(Subsequent reports suggested more than thirty Chinese miners were killed. For years, their corpses washed up along the banks of the river.)

Philosophy as [Wittgenstein] saw it was ‘not a theory’, but the practice of clarifying thoughts that are otherwise ‘opaque and blurred’.

Each volume…gave solidity to the idea that the world was on the point of abandoning piety, gullibility and moralistic repression, in favour of secularism, science and personal freedom…
Ogden shared Richards’s hopes for the liberation of art through the triumph of science, believing that if readers could stop reading poetry for its meaning they would be able to focus on its effects on their ears, eyes and emotions.

Wittgenstein spent five years as a soldier, and never regretted it. (‘It saved my life,’ he said: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without it.’) From the beginning he believed that living ‘face to face with death’ gave him ‘an opportunity to be a decent human being’, and he learned to endure hardship and danger, and value the friendship of his working-class comrades.

‘Democracy is a kind of religion,’ as [William] James put it, and it will fail if we do not believe in it. Philosophy would never be more than a ‘small force’ compared with habit, self-interest and passion – but ‘a small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these work inconsistently.’

‘Is it not in accordance with fundamental principles of your great nation to admit people from all lands who seek asylum on your shores?’ Angell, the head of the American delegation, had admitted that it was. But principles could be cast aside.

[William James] was, it seems, not a ‘child of the sunshine, at whose birth fairies made their gifts’, but a ‘neurotic subject’, susceptible to ‘one of the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of tears’, namely the ‘consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from seeing the better only to do worse.’

‘It was the jealousy of laboring men of other nationalities—especially the Irish—that raised all the outcry against the Chinese,’ Lee later wrote. ‘No one would hire an Irishman, German, Englishman or Italian when he could get a Chinese, because our countrymen are so much more honest, industrious, steady, sober and painstaking. Chinese were persecuted, not for their vices, but for their virtues.’

If you consider Spinoza in isolation, for instance, you will admire him as a self-effacing genius; but if you look at him historically you will see that he was destined to fail…History shows, in short, that every school of philosophy starts from a notion of the mind as a ‘mirror’, and ends by coming to grief.

The oppression of women had a unique place in the annals of social injustice, [Harriet Taylor] said, because ‘no other inferior caste…have been taught to regard their degradation as their honour’...The dependence of one sex on the other was ‘demoralizing to the character of both’, whereas the partnership of ‘a strong-minded man and a strong-minded woman’ was an ‘inestimable advantage’.

By [Bentham’s] fourth birthday he was reading English and Latin, and at the age of twelve he started at Oxford University, studying there for six years before moving to London and qualifying for the bar in 1769, at the age of twenty-one. But then he brought his career to a halt, declaring that he could not practise law until it had been purged of its absurdities.

Perhaps the truest measure of a country’s values can be found in whom it is willing to admit into its family of citizens.

[Hume] came to think that no belief is so robust that it can withstand all doubt, and nothing is more unreasonable than confidence in the power of reason. The mind, it seems, is beset by so many contradictions that if it tries to take stock it ‘entirely subverts itself’ ending with ‘no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all.’

Many philosophers...believed in innateness, but none...supposed that innate ideas are immediately present to the untrained mind: they regarded them as a kind of buried treasure which will never be discovered without some intellectual effort. Locke’s rejection of innate ideas...would assume that the mind of a new-born child is an ‘empty Cabinet’, and then work out how different kinds of ideas find their way inside.

It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke's better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not have any.

Wen ale mentschn soln zien ojf ejn sajt, wolt sich di welt ibergekert.

Wenn alle Menschen nach einer Richtung zögen, würde die Welt umkippen.

As men fregt a schajle is trejf.

Wenn eine Frage nötig ist, stimmt sicher etwas nicht.

Here are the facts. He's got a pig, and he's crazy about it.

In actual count of time, he was no longer in his first youth.

The framing of the first constitutions with bills of rights ranks among America’s foremost achievements, the more remarkable because both unprecedented and realized during wartime. Nevertheless, the phrasing of various rights and the inclusion and omission of particular ones in any given state constitution seem careless.

Besondere ökonomische Kausalitäten meiner Familie haben sich heuer folgenschwer fürs Christkind ausgewirkt.

Es dauert manchmal doch geraume Zeit, bis man erkennt, daß der Nikolaus kein Heiliger, sondern ein Mensch und der Krampus (Knecht Ruprecht, Schmutzli) ein Arschloch ist – aber ganz bestimmt kein Dämon! Die Angst vor jenen Herrn ist ein Stück guter alter Tradition und auch die Wirkung dieser Angst, die Generationen von Bettnässern erzeugte.

...the Constitution was neither a victory for abstract theory nor a great practical success. Well over half a million men had to die on the battlefields of the Civil War before certain constitutional principles could be defined—a baleful consideration which is somehow overlooked in our customary tributes to the farsighted genius of the Framers and to the supposed American talent for ‘constitutionalism.’

Rufus King’s motion that there be ‘a prohibition on the States to interfere in private contracts’ immediately evoked a barrage or criticism. After some discussion the Convention approved a substitute motion, made by Rutledge, from which King’s proposal was deliberately omitted and which provided instead only that ex post facto laws and bills of attainder be prohibited.

Der Film The Kid hat gar keinen richtigen Inhalt. Aber Chaplins Herz hat einen, und zu diesem Herzen gehört der feinste Kopf unter den lebenden Filmdarstellern und der klügste unter den Schauspielern überhaupt. Dieses Herz ist bei den Unterdrückten, und es hat eine gefährliche Waffe: sein Gehirn.

The problem was to find a method, if union was to subsist at all, for overcoming the difficulty, to find therefore some arrangement, some scheme or plan of organization wherein there would be reasonable assurance that the states would fulfill their obligations and play their part under established articles of union and not make mockery of union by willful disregard or negligent delay.

Bei den Heutigen ist es Faulheit, Phantasielosigkeit, Wichtigtuerei und Abwälzung der Verantwortung auf einen, der sich nicht mehr wehren kann. ‘Was gut ist, stammt natürlich von mir – den Rest mußte ich übernehmen.’