Category: Thought

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana, “Why I Am Not a Marxist,” The Modern Monthly, Volume 9, Number 2 (April 1935).

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (Myśli nieuczesane, 1957; Jacek Galazka, translator, 1962).

I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it), and carry it on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even though the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this country.

Mark Twain, Territorial Enterprise, April 7, 1868.

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

Joseph Campbell, quoted in Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, Viral: The Search for the Origins of COVID-19 (2021) as the epigraph to the first chapter.

When everything has to be right, something isn’t.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (Myśli nieuczesane, 1957; Jacek Galazka, translator, 1962).

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote.

Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (2014).