“Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher synthesis or adjustment, or else in a
reversion to more primitive ideas which have been outgrown but to which we drop
when jolted out of our attained position.” – Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals”
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” – George Harrison, “Any Road”
“In a war undertaken for any object, even if that object be the possession of a particular territory or position, an attack directly upon the place coveted may not be, from the military point of view, the best means of obtaining it. The end upon which the military operations are directed may therefore be other than the object which the belligerent government wishes to obtain, and it has received a name of its own, — the objective. In the critical consideration of any war it is necessary, first, to put clearly before the student’s eye the objects desired by each belligerent; then, to consider whether the objective chosen is the most likely, in case of success, to compass those objects ; and finally, to study the merits or faults of the various movements by which the objective is approached. The minuteness with which such an examination is conducted will depend upon the extent of the work which the inquirer proposes to himself; but it will generally conduce to clearness if an outline, giving only the main features unencumbered by detail, should precede a more exhaustive discussion. When such principal lines are thoroughly grasped, details are easily referred to them, and fall into place.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“Sophrosyne, which to the Greeks was an ideal second to none in importance, is not among our ideals. We have lost the conception of it. Enough is said about it in Greek literature for us to be able to describe it in some fashion, but we cannot give it a name. It was the spirit behind the two great Delphic sayings, ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing in excess.’ Arrogance, insolent self-assertion, was the quality most detested by the Greeks. Sophosyne was the exact opposite. It meant accepting the bounds which excellence lays down for human nature, restraining impulses to unrestricted freedom, to all excess, obeying the inner laws of harmony and proportion.” – Benjamin Jowett, “Introduction to Plato’s Charmides”
“The pretzel is said to have been invented almost fourteen hundred years ago in a monastery in southern France where a monk frugally twisted leftover scraps of dough into a shape like that of arms folded in prayer, with the three openings representing the Trinity.” – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals
“The result of planting apple seeds is a series of trees whose fruit is unpredictable.” – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals
“I would love to see all exotic wildlife in zoos allowed to live out their lives in peace and comfort and then not be replaced. Instead, have the zoos and aquariums be places where people – especially children – go to interact with animals that actually like us and want to be around us and not have to be on medication to deal with their lives behind the glass or bars. There are lots of animals who enjoy us, and I think children and adults would have a more meaningful experience interacting with animals who are interested in us.” – Laurel Braitman (interviewed by Malcolm Harris in The New Inquiry, September 2012)
“Good troops have often made amends for bad generalship; but in the end the better leader will prevail.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“Seaports should defend themselves; the sphere of the fleet is on the open sea, its object offence rather than defence, its objective the enemy’s shipping wherever it can be found.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“No well ordered society can leave to the individuals an absolute right to make final decisions, unassailable by the State, as to everything they will or will not do.” – Justice Hugo Lafayette Black and Justice William Orville Douglas, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
“Free public education, if faithful to the ideal of secular instruction and political neutrality, will not be partisan or enemy of any class, creed, party, or faction.” – Chief Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
“What do you want to see come into the world? How can you bring it into the world today, even just a little bit?” — Bud Smith, “Four Memories of Giancarlo DiTrapano”
“Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Writers can be only so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Judgment is to be made of actions according to the times in which they were performed. The conduct of a wise politician is ever suited to the present posture of affairs; often by foregoing a part he saves the whole, and by yielding in a small matter secures a greater.” – “Comparison of Poplicola with Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)
“The remission of debts was peculiar to Solon; it was his great means for confirming the citizens’ liberty; for a mere law to give all men equal rights is but useless, if the poor must sacrifice those rights to their debts, and, in the very seats and sanctuaries of equality, the courts of justice, the offices of state, and the public discussions, be more than anywhere at the beck and bidding of the rich. A yet more extraordinary success was, that, although usually civil violence is caused by any remission of debts, upon this one occasion this dangerous but powerful remedy actually put an end to civil violence already existing,” – “Comparison of Poplicola with Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)
“A people always minds its rulers best
When it is neither humored nor oppressed.”
– “Comparison of Poplicola with Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)
“The trading temper, independent and insubordinate, is absolutely opposed to the military spirit.” – Admiral comte Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez, bailli de Suffren, Letter to Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix de Castries, marquis de Castries, baron des États de Languedoc, comte de Charlus, baron de Castelnau et de Montjouvent, seigneur de Puylaurens et de Lézignan, Autumn 1782
“Perhaps no other culture has valued the contrived happy ending as much as ours.” – Stephen Beachy, “Who Is the Real JT LeRoy?”
“It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment” (trans. Francis McDonagh)
“Never say never, because it’s never never.” – Yoko Ono, “Bad Dancer”
“The middle of a great and unsuccessful war is no time to begin preparations. ‘Better late than never’ is not so safe a proverb as ‘In time of peace prepare for war.’ “ – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“The average man is not a coward; but neither is he endowed by nature only with the rare faculty of seizing intuitively the proper course at a critical moment. He gains it, some more, some less, by experience or by reflection.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“Most of the authors of the New Testament did not write particularly well, even by the forgiving standards of the koiné—that is, ‘common’—Greek in which they worked. The unknown author of the Letter to the Hebrews commanded a fairly distinguished and erudite style, and was obviously an accomplished native speaker of the tongue; and Luke, the author of both the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, wrote in an urbane, unspectacular, but mostly graceful prose; the author of the first letter attributed to Peter was clearly an educated person whose primary language was a fairly refined form of Greek, while the author of the second letter wrote in a somewhat bombastic style, of the kind classically called Asiatic Greek; but the language of most of the canon is anything but extraordinary. Paul’s letters possess an elemental power born out of the passion of his faith and the marvel of what he believes has been revealed to him, and his prose occasionally flowers into a plain but startling lyricism; but his Greek is generally rough, sometimes inept, and occasionally incoherent. The Gospel of Mark contains obvious solecisms and is awkwardly written throughout. The prose of the Gospel of Matthew is rarely better than ponderous. Even the Gospel of John, perhaps the most structurally and symbolically sophisticated religious text to have come down to us from late antiquity, is written in a Greek that is grammatically correct but syntactically almost childish (or perhaps I should say, ‘remarkably limpid’), and—unless its author was some late first-century precursor of Gertrude Stein—its stylistic limitations suggest an author whose command of the language did not exceed mere functional competence. Then, of course, the book of Revelation, the last New Testament text to be accepted into the canon—it was not firmly established there throughout the Christian world until the early fifth century—is, if judged purely by the normal standards of literary style and good taste, almost unremittingly atrocious. And, in the most refined pagan critics of the new faith in late antiquity, the stylistic coarseness of Christian literature often provoked the purest kind of patrician contempt. This is all evidence, however, of a deeper truth about these texts: They are not beguiling exercises in suasive rhetoric or feats of literary virtuosity; rather, they are chiefly the devout and urgent attempts of often rather ordinary persons to communicate something ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ that transcends any language, but that nevertheless demands to be spoken, now, here, in whatever words one can marshal. This is the special amphibology of Christian scripture. Whereas the Jewish Bible represents the concentrated literary genius of an ancient and amazingly rich culture—mythic, epic, lyric, historical, and visionary, in texts assembled over many centuries and then judiciously synthesized, redacted, and polished—the Christian New Testament is a somewhat unsystematically compiled and pragmatically edited compendium of ‘important documentation’: writings from the first generation of witnesses to the new faith, the oldest ambassadors to us from the apostolic and early postapostolic ages, consisting in quickly limned stories, theological discourses, and even a bit of historically impenetrable occasional writing. As such it draws one in by the intensity, purity, and perhaps frequent naiveté of its language, not by the exquisite sheen of its belletristic graces.” – David Bentley Hart, “Introduction,” The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)
“If there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain. I suppose that if anyone were told to pick out the night on which he slept so soundly as not even to dream, and then to compare it with all the other nights and days of his life, and then were told to say, after the consideration, how many better and happier days and nights than this he had spent in the course of his life—well, I think that the Great King himself, to say nothing of any private person, would find these days and nights easy to count in comparison with the rest. If death is like this, then, I call it a gain, because the whole of time, if you look at it this way, can be regarded as no more than one single night.” – Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology) (trans. Hugh Tredennick)
“The difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong, which is far more fleet of foot.” – Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology) (trans. Hugh Tredennick)
“I do not think that it is right for a man to appeal to the jury or to get himself acquitted by doing so; he ought to inform them of the facts and convince them by argument. The jury does not sit to dispense justice as a favor, but to decide where justice lies, and the oath which they have sworn is not to show favor at their own discretion, but to return a just and lawful verdict.” – Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology) (trans. Hugh Tredennick)
“The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.” – Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology) (trans. Hugh Tredennick)
“You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action—that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one.” – Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology) (trans. Hugh Tredennick)