Category: Thought

Every man should be considered as having a right to the character which he deserves; that is, to be spoken of according to his actions.

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Life is fired at us point blank.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

José Ortega y Gasset, “Man has no nature,” in History as a System (1962).

It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer.

This statement, and others like it in William of Ockham’s work, has led philosophers to express the idea with precision as “Ockham’s razor” — specifically, in the phrase, nowhere found in Ockham, of “Don’t multiply [explanatory] entities beyond necessity.”