Quotes

“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t ‘attack’ anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

“Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts. Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true. Refuse to accept your brain’s first-order response that you probably can’t achieve goal X because of restrictions Y and Z. Instead, approach restrictions Y and Z with a puzzle-solving mindset, relishing the challenge of discovering how to work around them.”

“But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

“Agent Hoffman: ‘OK, well, listen, I understand attorney-client privilege. I understand all the legal gamesmanship, and I understand that’s how you make your living, but I’m talking to you about something else, the security of your country. I’m sorry if the way I put it offends you, but we need to know what Abel is telling you. You understand me, Donovan? Don’t go Boy Scout on me. We don’t have a rule book here.’

James Donovan: ‘You’re Agent Hoffman, yeah?’

Agent Hoffman: ‘Yeah.’

James Donovan: ‘German extraction.’

Agent Hoffman: ‘Yeah, so?’

James Donovan: ‘My name’s Donovan. Irish, both sides. Mother and father. I’m Irish and you’re German. But what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One. Only one. The rule book. We call it the Constitution, and we agree to the rules, and that’s what makes us Americans. That’s all that makes us Americans. So don’t tell me there’s no rule book, and don’t nod at me like that you son of a bitch.’”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic, as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

“And we wouldn’t be able to study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much happier and more cheerful, and it makes us return to nature, despite our education and our work in a world of convention.”

“ALWAYS LIFT HEAVY—THAT’S WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING!”

“Although it may appeal to a man’s selfish instincts to sit in sweatpants and type on a computer in a locked room while gnawing on a turkey leg, he’s spiritually, civically and morally improved by embodied interactions, by spending time in public space.

The relaxed fashion and behavior in the home may seem preferable to the formalities of the office, but the current resentment toward a public standard of appearance indicates widespread maladaptation and stunted maturity, a pathological obliviousness to others and a decline of outwardly directed behavior in professional and collective settings. We dress like refugees and mental patients because of mass-produced sleepwear and because we’re not expected to cultivate self-respect or restraint. We don’t value bodily comfort obesity and chronic illness ravage the body, bad choices trouble the soul.

People wear comfortable clothes in public because they’re uncomfortable, because their bodies are panicked and inflamed from decades of nutritional and emotional chaos.

Modern hedonism violently contradicts the sagely approach to moderating passions and limiting pleasures. Unrestrained eating, drinking, drug intake and consumption of media implies hatred of the body, not love of the senses.”

“It is good conservation practice, if you are going to develop, to concentrate people and leave wild land around them. People need earning territory—territory they have to earn by walking, limping, crawling, or whatever they can do.”

“I believe in the public good until I’m out in public.”

“Culture is the set of answers to the basic questions of mankind, be they humdrum or lofty: Whom shall I marry? What shall I eat and how shall I cook my meals? How shall I behave with my social and natural surrounding? Whom shall I worship? In each case, a culture distinguished a right and wrong behavior, hence what we call ‘values.’ What we call a culture or a civilization is a definite set of answers that distinguish a right way and a wrong one: thou shalt marry a suitable person belonging to this group, and not have incestuous commerce; thou shalt eat this food and not that disgusting filth; thou shalt worship this god of ours and not that foreign idol, and so on.”

“Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttar-akurus or ‘the Men of Perfect Virtue’ of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability.

The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal.

One characteristic of the Men of the Golden Age: they are always remembered as migratory.”

“I do not and will not fear tomorrow because I feel as though today has been enough.”

“Pretend you are an atheist in the Middle Ages. How would you have managed? You could have kept quiet and pretended to go along with the dominant beliefs, you could have expressed your disagreements and doubts in code or obliquely through art, or you could have spoken up and challenged the consensus and demanded recognition of your minority views.

Those are still your options. Most likely you will not be strung up by your testicles or impaled or crucified or burned at the stake or have molten lead poured down your throat or have your fingertips smashed. You probably will not be buried up to your neck in the hot desert sand with your eyelids cut off so the sun cooks your eyeballs and you probably will not have your head slathered in honey so ants and flies eat your face.”

“What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we living things—men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge—we were a part of it all. That should be enough.”

“The Bushmen, who walk immense distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. ‘When we die, we die, they say. The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.’ Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians—with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds—project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”

“If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do.”

“Names, names, the naming of the names. What’s this? What’s that? they ask me, pointing to this bush, that bush. I give my standard reply: What it is, ma’am, no one knows; but men call it—creosote bush.”

“The university’s task is thus well-defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving—by keeping alive—the works of those who best addressed these questions.”

“Human beings are what they learn to become within an already ongoing world of ideas which they discover in their unsought entrance to it. From the outset, each of us encounters a world presented to us by others as something already understood, compelling us to seek to understand what others seem already to understand.”

“There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveller. Therefore wander!”

“Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood....afresh dawns the morn of life…”

“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred?”

“Of course, as we use it [the sacred], it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or life-style with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or sex; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.”

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.”

“Even with appliances and devices, the technical outsourcing of family to machines, a single man is also his own wife and maid, his own father and grandfather and son. A laborer and a housekeeper and cook, activities manager and social director. He’s responsible for seeking out his own wisdom and recreation. The atomized self tends toward androgyny, in that it must carry out the work of both sexes.”

“If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do.”

“But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

“The leftist concept of emotional labor used to describe how service jobs require a performance of happiness and camaraderie. Now the idea is cited in a petulant demand to be paid for listening to your friends and family. Economic thinking has seeped into every domain, corrupted all relationships. We feel pressured to treat coworkers like friends and feel entitled to treat friends and family like clients. A warm smiling face for bloodless transactions and a self-interested logic applied to the most intimate bonds.”

“Every time you skirt around small frictions, you accumulate debt in the form of resentment. The debt grows, and for a while it might seem manageable, but then one day you just don’t like the person anymore.”

“We live in a world that depends for its economic survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Archaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.”

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.”

“I go everywhere. I admire all kinds of country...But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I’m home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea—it’s the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I’ve stopped trying. It’s incurable.”

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic, as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

“As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.”

“The Hero Cycle, wherever found, is a story of ‘fitness’ in the Darwinian sense: a blueprint for genetic ‘success’. Beowulf leaves... Ivan leaves... Jack leaves... the young Aboriginal on Walkabout leaves... even the antique Don Quixote leaves, And these Wanderjahre, and combats with the Beast, are the story-teller’s version of the incest taboo; whereby a man must first prove ‘fitness’ and then must ‘marry far.

In practice, it scarcely matters whether myths are the coded messages of instinct, whose structures will reside in the central nervous system, or tales of instruction handed down from the Year Dot. One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. Seldom, if ever, in myth, is it desirable, morally, for a man to kill a man in cold blood.”

“What characterizes man is not any unity which is finally, perfectly, achieved, but the activity and effort undertaken in view of unity, the action by which he progresses toward communion without ever completely realizing it.”

“It is not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether hunting, birdwatching, angling, or sailing, and each creates superb opportunities to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water.”

“The Bible tells us to watch and to listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.”

“Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’, and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. Nomos thus came to mean ‘law’, ‘fair distribution’, ‘that which is allotted by custom’ - and so the basis of all Western law.

The verb nemein - to ‘graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’, or ‘to spread’ - has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ - especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’: hence ‘numismatics’.”

“To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.”

“I have been raised in the country all my life. I love dearly to feel the wind on my face, to see the sunrise, to see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box.”

“Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land./

Well, they dug for their coal ’til the land was forsaken/

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”

“Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’, and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. Nomos thus came to mean ‘law’, ‘fair distribution’, ‘that which is allotted by custom’ - and so the basis of all Western law.

The verb nemein - to ‘graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’, or ‘to spread’ - has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ - especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’: hence ‘numismatics’.”

“Language is the product of synergism between values of the society, communication theory, biology, physiology, physics (of the inherit limitations of our brains as well as our phonetics), and human thought. I believe this is also true of the engine of language, grammar.

Both modern linguistics and the bulk of the philosophy of language have chosen to separate language from culture in their quests to understand human communication. By this move they fail to come to grips with language as a “natural phenomenon,” to use the words the philosopher John Searle. Many linguists and philosophers since the 1950s have characterized language almost exclusively in terms of mathematical logic. It is almost as if the fact that language has meaning and is spoke by human beings is irrelevant to the enterprise of understanding it.”

“People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government. Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said ‘You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!’ Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship. If you ‘criticize’ society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a ‘bold iconoclast’ or ‘having brave and revolutionary new ideas’ or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.”

“Of course, as we use it [the sacred], it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or life-style with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or sex; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.”

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

“Life is a verb.”

“Today, we are to believe that the love of humanity is normal (in both senses of the term), while the love of the particular is ignoble. But both are human. Love of the particular is natural, and the natural cannot be denigrated: it exists, and it belongs to life.”

“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.

Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.

Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.

Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.

For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”

“For women, this ideal of personhood took definitive legal form in the legalisation of abortion, and broader form in the rejection of ‘care’ as in any sense a female domain or obligation. But the net impact of women rejecting a sexist obligation to shoulder the burden of care hasn’t yet been men taking on an equal part of that burden. Rather, it’s been an awkward mixture of poorer people—usually women—being deputised as paid substitute carers, and those most in need of care often going without.”

“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.

Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.

Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.

Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.

For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”

“There is a hidden path for you also that remains…behind the marketplace, it begins in the thickets of small woods…it winds up many steep paths toward the high mountain air, to life in the ascent, uncorrupted by the miasma of the yeast man and the toilets in the river valleys…the life of Jason’s Argo can be reclaimed…and by some few in the modern world, it has been…”

“What Mount Aetna was to Empedocles—is there something like that to you? Is there something like that at all anymore?”

Μὴ σικχαίνειν μηδὲ ἀπαυδᾶν μηδὲ ἀποδυσπετεῖν, εἰ μὴ καταπυκνοῦταί σοι τὸ ἀπὸ δογμάτων ὀρθῶν ἕκαστα πράσσειν· ἀλλὰ ἐκκρουσθέντα πάλιν ἐπανιέναι καὶ ἀσμενίζειν, εἰ τὰ πλείω ἀνθρωπικώτερα, καὶ φιλεῖν τοῦτο, ἐφ᾿ ὃ ἐπανέρχῃ.

“Do not be disgusted nor discouraged nor dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when you have failed return back again, and be content if the greater part of what you do is consistent with man’s nature, and love this to which you return.”

Μηκέθ᾿ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ, οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα δεῖ, διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.

“Put an end once and for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one.”

“But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

“People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government. Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said ‘You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!’ Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship. If you ‘criticize’ society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a ‘bold iconoclast’ or ‘having brave and revolutionary new ideas’ or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.”

“We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the idea of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law upon our pert loquacity.”

“The human spirit has two remarkable powers: invention and assimilation. Turning the old into the new and then turning the new into the old. The most abrasive intrusion into the body and the most violent disruption of habit are quickly absorbed and domesticated. Almost immediately we lose our connection to old ways, our former agonies. The clanking of machines drowns out years of suffering. New technical programs revise our memories and beliefs in their own image, and the present stands ready to be erased by the future.”

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.”

“Names, names, the naming of the names. What’s this? What’s that? they ask me, pointing to this bush, that bush. I give my standard reply: What it is, ma’am, no one knows; but men call it—creosote bush.”

“If the mind itself is not included among the things that are relative to cultures, the observations of cultural relativism are trivial and have always been accepted. Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist want to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. If there is an escape for one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history, or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the principle of science and philosophy.”

“As for ourselves, on the one hand, contemporary science, or rather the ideological use made of it by the mainstream media, leads us to believe that we are hardly more than lucky monkeys, produced by the chance encounter of irrational forces. On the other hand, we harp upon the “dignity” of man, endowed with “human rights” that are supposed to provide us with the unshakable ground for our moral choices and legal rulings. Little wonder that some people propose to enlarge the notions of rights to animals, since human beings themselves are conceived of as animals that happen to be endowed, nobody knows why, with sacred and unalienable rights.”

“We meet here a paradox that was already pointed out on another level: natural science represents a fantastic triumph of reason, but at the same time it claims to show that reason is merely a product—and an unintentional product, an epiphenomenon—of evolution, that is, of a movement that was led by blind and irrational forces.”

“Nothing seemed to happen except what always happened, at its regular time and in its regular way. The traffic got heavy and then it got lighter. The day was hot and now it was cooler. The shadows hid underground and now they oozed up and spread everywhere like spilled oil. It was summer but soon it would be fall. The sun would set and the horizon would glow red and orange like embers. Even Clemons’s crimes and wanderings fit into the fixed order. One broken life did nothing to disturb the workings of the world.

Everything the same even in its changes. Every scrap of matter, every last acorn or spot of sunlight changing just as it should, blending into its opposite or morphing into a being wholly unlike it. In all movement and bustle and chaos and noise there was a profound stillness and silence, something abiding yet unknowable.”

“With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin, and where time and men and deeds connected.”

“Human life is miserable in this exact way: you fall short of your ideals but you exceed your low expectations. You are too good to enjoy what’s base but not good enough to fulfill your higher calling. A little more than nothing and a little less than something. No peace in the void, no plenitude of being.”

“Every truly moral development requires such a passing through experiences, regrets, and sorrows. Only after a long voyage can the conscience recognize evil as such.”

“I go everywhere. I admire all kinds of country...But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I’m home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea—it’s the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I’ve stopped trying. It’s incurable.”

“Bowie, born somewhere in the South in the 1790’s, was raised in a family that became wealthy in Louisiana early in the century. He roamed, running slaves with Jean Lafitte in contravention to what every Southerner felt was a stupid law, exploring Texas, fighting Indians. Bowie was remarkable in two respects. He fitted in easily with the best society of the Creole towns and vast plantations, and he had the enormous respect of the wildest and toughest men on the harshest of all American frontiers. He was a killer: he killed the son of Jean Lafitte, who crossed him, crippled ‘Bloody’ Sturdivant, gutted Major Norris Wright and a verified number of others, in the most desperate ‘medleys’ or duels. He made the great knife his brother Rezin forged for him a glittering legend; soon Bowie knives were manufactured in England for sale on the American frontier. Yet Bowie was simply not a killer in the modern, civilized sense. He lived in a violent society, and men of keen judgement and good breeding considered him quite sound. The respect tendered him far exceeded that of any duelist.”

“I do not and will not fear tomorrow because I feel as though today has been enough.”

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

“We live in a world that depends for its economic survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Archaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.”

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.”

Μὴ σικχαίνειν μηδὲ ἀπαυδᾶν μηδὲ ἀποδυσπετεῖν, εἰ μὴ καταπυκνοῦταί σοι τὸ ἀπὸ δογμάτων ὀρθῶν ἕκαστα πράσσειν· ἀλλὰ ἐκκρουσθέντα πάλιν ἐπανιέναι καὶ ἀσμενίζειν, εἰ τὰ πλείω ἀνθρωπικώτερα, καὶ φιλεῖν τοῦτο, ἐφ᾿ ὃ ἐπανέρχῃ.

“Do not be disgusted nor discouraged nor dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when you have failed return back again, and be content if the greater part of what you do is consistent with man’s nature, and love this to which you return.”

Μηκέθ᾿ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ, οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα δεῖ, διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.

“Put an end once and for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one.”

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

“Opinions on the right of intervention naturally evolve with the times, espousing the dominant values of the period. Speaking generally, the opposite of what each period finds most important will not be tolerated. When religion dominated, it justified wars, as Montesquieu observed: ‘Religion gives to those who profess it a right to enslave those who do not, in order to more easily propagate it.’ Today, one can say the same thing of the morality of human rights, while religion is compelled to be tolerant because it has assumed a lesser importance.”

“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred?”

“If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do.”

“Every binary split creates a temptation to merely reverse its terms, to elevate what has been devalued and denigrate what has been overvalued.”

“Never hand emotional control to people who don’t love you.”

“Division of labor multiplies inconvenience, obnoxious intermediaries, liaisons and representatives. Zeno’s paradox of infinite middlemen between middlemen. People make their living by making my living harder to make. Division of labor is subtraction of organic bonds. Almost everyone I know I met through an economic or electronic exchange. No human contact without an application, contract, a bill or an app. Professional and romantic relationships dissolved with a message, a phone call. Cutting someone out takes less than a gesture. Whole networks pulverized and reformed every six months.”

“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”

“On the steps of the Forum at Timgad, one board sums it all up with ‘Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that’s living.’ (VENARI LAVARE LUDERE RIDERE OCCEST VIVERE).”

“No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved. All the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”