Clícia’s Reviews > In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays > Status Update

It is difficult for writers not to
measure their own merit by their royalties, and when
bad work brings great pecuniary rewards it requires
unusual firmness of character to produce good work and
remain poor.

Painting, in former days, accompanied and
adorned spacious architecture, and may do so again
when the squalid privacy engendered by our competitive
fear of our neighbours has given place to a desire for
communal beauty.

It is said by many in the present
day that Communism and Fascism
are the only practical
alternatives in politics, and that
whoever does not support the
one in effect supports the
other. I find myself in
opposition to both, and I can no
more accept either alternative
than, if I had lived in the
sixteenth century, I could have
been either a Protestant or a
Catholic.

The difficulty, of course, is to know who are the elect. In a
world in which Fichte’s doctrine was universally accepted,
every man would think that he was “noble,” and would join
some party of people sufficiently similar to himself to seem
to share some of his nobility.

Treitschke, Rudyard Kipling, Houston Chamberlain, and
Bergson

Fichte, Carlyle, Mazzini, Nietzsche

about Hume: "But his almost unexampled combination
of acuteness with intellectual honesty led him to certain
devastating conclusions : that induction is a habit without
logical justification, and that the belief in causation is
little better than a superstition."

make the democracies of
the world aware of the importance of
finance, and to find ways of simplifying
the principles of finance so that they can
be widely understood.