“The king who, arriving at certain conclusions, carries on his regal affairs agreeable to justice, has no need to repent afterwards. But those actions that are done without deliberation, like unto clarified butter poured onto an unclean sacrifice, conduce only to harm.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddhakanda Sarga 12
“So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)
“Compromise on public issues is the price of civilization, not an abrogation of principle.” — Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence
“If Americans want the U.S. to continue to exist in something like its current form, they will need to respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It can’t survive if we end the separation of church and state or ban the expression (or criticism) of offensive ideas. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Supreme Court, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting. The union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent decision-making on important issues. Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more dysfunctional than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. Our constitutional order — an arrangement negotiated among the regional cultures — assumes and requires compromise in order to function at all. And the U.S. needs its central government to function cleanly, openly and efficiently because it’s one of the few important things that bind us together.” — Colin Woodard, “Real U.S. Map, a Country of Regions”
“Out of unrestricted competition arise many wrongs that the State must redress and many abuses which it must check. It may become the duty of the State to reform its taxation, so that its burdens shall rest less heavily upon the lower classes; to repress monopolies of all sorts; to prevent and punish gambling; to regulate or control the railroads and telegraphs; to limit the ownership of land; to modify the laws of inheritance; and possibly to levy a progressive income-tax, so that the enormous fortunes should bear more rather than less than their share of the public burdens.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)
“Dishonest men can be bought and ignorant men can be manipulated. This is the kind of government which private capital, invested in public-service industries, naturally feels that it must have.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)
“Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks. Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts. A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or vice versa.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up…. Who knows why? They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won’t matter any more than a full moon behind clouds.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear (ellipsis in original)
“Vicious thieves have always ruled the world.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything–especially not if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime. Maybe he has no evidence. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe. The Law can be hazy on these things.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“The only real difference between the Sane and the Insane, in this world, is the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“It has been extremely lucky that up to now wars have been fought only by men. If they had been fought by women, they would have been so consistently cruel that today there wouldn’t be a single human being left on the planet.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“He that, renouncing righteousness and the good, devotes himself to pleasure solely, is like a man that falling asleep on top of a tree, wakes when he has fallen down.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Kishkindhakanda Sarga 38
“The more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Nothing is more useful than to adopt the status of a child: a child can do whatever it likes, for it is innocent and inexperienced; it need not observe the rules of social behavior, for it has not yet entered a world ruled by form; it may show its feelings, whether they are appropriate or not.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“The whole art of politics these days lies not in running the polis (which runs itself by the logic of its own dark and uncontrollable mechanism), but in thinking up ‘sound bites’ by which the politician is seen and understood, measured in opinion polls, and elected or rejected in elections.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“It is no Disgrace to be Poor; it is simply Inconvenient.” — George Ade, from Fables in Slang
High Street 4.7 — “Radio Stars and Hemp TV” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 4.8 — “Radio Stars and Hemp TV” (cont.))
“A full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane.” — Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
High Street 2 — “How to Get to High Street” is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 3.1 — “Downhill Racing”)
“For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.” — Troy Davis, September 21, 2011 (quote from BBC News)
“Our legal system is adversarial, founded, like capitalism, on the idea that a bunch of people trying to tear each other apart, plus certain laws and procedures preventing things from getting too out of hand, will yield, in one, justice, and in the other, prosperity, for all. Sometimes this does happen; other times, it doesn’t. At any rate, it’s a terrible metaphor for the rest of life.”– Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.” — Jason Fried & David Hansson (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make. Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak. Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“In punishing wrongdoers, no one concentrates on the fact that a man has done wrong in the past, or punishes him on that account, unless taking blind vengeance like a beast. No, punishment is not inflicted by a rational man for the sake of the crime that has been committed–after all one cannot undo what is past–but for the sake of the future, to prevent either the same man or, by the spectacle of his punishment, someone else, from doing wrong again. But to hold such a view amounts to holding that virtue can be instilled by education; at all events the punishment is inflicted as a deterrent. This then is the view held by all who inflict it whether privately or publicly.” — Plato, Protagoras (trans. Guthrie)
“No one is angered by the thoughts which are believed to be due to nature or chance, nor do people rebuke or teach or punish those who exhibit them, in the hope of curing them; they simply pity them. Who would be so foolish as to treat in that way the ugly or dwarfish or weak? Everyone knows that it is nature or chance which gives this kind of characteristics to a man, both the good and the bad. But it is otherwise with the good qualities which are thought to be acquired through care and practice and instruction. It is the absence of these, surely, and the presence of the corresponding vices, that call forth indignation and punishment and admonition. Among these faults are to be put injustice and irreligion and in general everything that is contrary to civic virtue. In this field indignation and admonition are universal, evidently because of a belief that such virtue can be acquired by taking thought or by instruction.” — Plato, Protagoras (trans. Guthrie)
“The mass of people notice nothing, but simply echo what the leaders tell them.” — Plato, Protagoras (trans. Guthrie)
“We mold the best and strongest among ourselves, catching them young like lion cubs, and by spells and incantations we make slaves of them, saying that they must be content with equality and that this is what is right and fair. But if a man arises endowed with a nature sufficiently strong, he will, I believe, shake off all these controls, burst his fetters, and break loose. And trampling upon our scraps of paper, our spells and incantations, and all our unnatural conventions, he rises up and reveals himself our master who was once our slave, and there shines forth nature’s true justice.” — Plato, Gorgias (trans. Woodhead)
“All knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom.” — Plato, Menexenus (trans. Jowett)
“Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles and Fries” is the result of taking a handful of ideas languishing in the workshop, mixing them together to see how they might fit, and making a prose bracelet out of them. It was published in The Writing Disorder on New Year’s Eve last year.