Tuesday, May 31. 2022
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
- Michelangelo
Tuesday, April 12. 2022
Camping: where you spend a small fortune to live like a homeless person.
My doctor asked if anyone in my family suffers from mental illness. I said, "No, we all seem to enjoy it."
Thursday, March 17. 2022
In his science fiction novel Nemesis, Isaac Asimov describes a female character as possessing the "unloveable virtues": Serious, Practical, Responsible, Dutiful.
When I googled the concept, I found this: "Stan Asimov used to say that his brother Isaac had "all the unlovable virtues". Then, while describing a character in Nemesis, Isaac wrote "she possesses what someone once described to me as all the unlovable virtues"."
Tuesday, March 8. 2022
'The first casualty, when war comes, is truth.'
- Hiram Johnson (1866-1945)
I do not believe a single thing I read about this war. It is all propaganda lies from all sides.
Friday, February 18. 2022
"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident."
Charles Lamb
Monday, December 13. 2021
From a reader:
“It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.”
And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap.
“Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
John Steinbeck, from Travels with Charley
Tuesday, December 7. 2021
Politicians are the same all over: they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev, Russian Soviet politician
Sunday, December 5. 2021
"Liberals have invented whole college majors -- psychology, sociology and women's studies -- to prove that nothing is anybody's fault."
P. J. O'Rourke, via Nothing is Anybody's Fault
Tuesday, November 30. 2021
"What is the chief end of man?” And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”
Sunday, October 24. 2021
Knowing about something, and knowing something, are different
- Anonymous
Monday, October 11. 2021
"Live and don't learn, that's us."
- Hobbes, the Tiger
Sunday, September 12. 2021
“Believe me my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
So says Ratty to Mole in Kenneth Grahame's classic 1908 novel 'The Wind in the Willows'.
Wednesday, September 8. 2021
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen
Plenty of readers might not approve of Woody Allen, but that quote certainly applies to my life trajectory. You meet people, some of them think you are neither stupid nor an ahole, and good things tend to happen.
Tuesday, August 10. 2021
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C. S. Lewis
Thursday, August 5. 2021
"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes
- Tom Paine
Thursday, July 29. 2021
"The government is idiotic, but more government is the answer."
Via the UK Spectator's A volte face over what caused the pandemic needs explaining
Wednesday, July 28. 2021
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
- George Orwell, 1984
Tuesday, July 20. 2021
We asked my father-in-law how his 96 year-old buddy was doing. Reply:
"He's beginning to show his age."
Thursday, May 13. 2021
A general difference between Republicans and modern Democrats is not so much ideological as it is the Democrats' failure to understand human incentive, and human nature in general.
That's a paraphrase of Scott Adams. I'm not sure that it is true, but I get his point.
Friday, April 30. 2021
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Mark Twain
Thursday, February 25. 2021
"Pointing out somebody's hypocrisy never changed anybody's mind."
Scott Adams
Wednesday, February 24. 2021
“It is not the (Bible) passages that I do not understand that bother me. It is the passages that I do understand that bother me.”
Mark Twain
Tuesday, February 23. 2021
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Saul Bellow, via Powerline on the sordid ritual of political confession
Thursday, February 18. 2021
Who controls the memes, controls the Universe.
Elon Musk
That evil, if true, quote comes from a Quilette post on The Narrative and Its Discontents. Who constructs our realities? Scott Adams likes to talk about how we are all hypnotized, and there is some truth in that. The awareness of that might be the way out of it.
Scott, like Rush, were/are de-hyponotizers.
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