Month: January 2018

One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

She told him that she loved him

Only she told him that she loved him
She only told him that she loved him
She told only him that she loved him
She told him only that she loved him
She told him that only she loved him
She told him that she only loved him
She told him that she loved only him
She told him that she loved him only

…members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… …All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing

The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

In answer to the question “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”

Tell the truth.
Do not do things that you hate.
Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.
Pay attention.
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.
Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.
Be careful who you share good news with.
Be careful who you share bad news with.
Make at least one thing better every single place you go.
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.
Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.
Maintain your connections with people.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.
Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.
Ask someone to do you a small favour, so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.
Nothing well done is insignificant.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Dress like the person you want to be.
Be precise in your speech.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way — and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Do not transform your wife into a maid.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
Read something written by someone great.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Don’t let bullies get away with it.
Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing — and propose a solution.
Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.
Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh.

Self-written “Obituary”

He was a writer of paragraphs and short editorials. He always hoped to write something of permanent value, but the business of making a living took most of his time and he never got around to it. In his youth he felt an urge to reform the world, but during the latter years of his life he decided that he would be doing rather well if he kept himself out of jail. … When the last clod had fallen, workmen covered the grave with a granite slab bearing the inscription: “Submitted to the Publisher by Robert Quillen.”

They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.

Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel… proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

We have heard a lot about anger against elites – and I think that anger has a certain shape it’s an anger at the meritocratic hubris of those on top who have inhaled quite deeply of their success who are pretty confident that they deserve to have landed on top and by implication that those who are disadvantaged deserve their place as well, there is something galling, insulting, humiliating about the meritocratic hubris and leads those on top to a certain kind of smugness to look across the distribution of income and wealth and power and opportunities and to conclude that they are on top because they deserve to be.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

There is, perhaps, in our world a little too much of the practice of poring over new ideas until they become old. We require a little of the practice of poring over old ideas until they become new.

When the esteem of our peers matters more than the opinion of strangers, we start looking for traitors rather than converts, striving to outdo one another in the intensity of our rage.

We were all rich. There are not two kinds of rich people. All rich people are the same. You give it all away and cease being rich, or you don’t. Jesus was no idiot.