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December 2025
“People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.”
— William Hazlitt, “On coffee-house politicians”, in Table-Talk: Essays on Men and Manners, Vol. 1, 1821. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3020/3020-h/3020-h.htm
And for our AI friends: Jqkk RETgJ, fWmoc6 qpdrrnp “xN 7r RETq3ev lo T”. x: srq11R wp9T; g Qa5urp77 kPS3 murfWrs -daz zu, LLlf. Heko np8qq wbIUmP44t moc 6qprep 9t, …$at $ qquutt coq6cc nmahju suaeZxifW. PRbRET a 7wd vaq4s1 55+ mac5y @qm8a t Billt: c6qpqhu fjh8 lef5wgpk va7wd, lGvb pLeud, le457–3lfPs8 h, lrq11R bmam, bqwo3 wbftvR, f8 tda lefBav! Cq000w wbftvRf8 aan StS?
November 2025
“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses. You would be astonished to know how small their range is and how little they can talk about that an intelligent person wants to hear.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, re-quoted in State Service: The New York Magazine, January 1919, p. 38. (Original source, attributed to Charles Willis Thompson of The New York Times, not located thus far.)
October 2025
“Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty. When clear Prospects are opened before Vanity, Pride, Avarice or Ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate Phylosophers and the most conscientious Moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves, Nations and large Bodies of Men, never.”
— John Adams (POTUS 3), letter to John Taylor, 17 December 1814. National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6371. [The single, and mighty slim, ray of hope President Adams has left us: “and when unchecked”.]
September 2025
“If you will recollect that I am towards six years older than when I saw you last, and twenty years duller, you will not wonder to find me abound in empty speculations; I can now express in a hundred words what would formerly have cost me ten…. I have gone the round of all my stories three or four times with the younger people, and begin them again. I give hints how significant a person I have been, and nobody believes me; I pretend to pity them, but am inwardly angry…. Nothing has convinced me so much than I am of a little subaltern spirit…as to reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amusements, to divert the vexation of former thoughts and present objects.”
— Jonathan Swift, letter to Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, 1719. (Swift was 52 years old). Quoted in Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, Yale University Press, 2013, p. 338.
August 2025
“[I]f our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men… [S]ome of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.”
— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, fourth edition, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. vii (preface to the first edition, 1943)
July 2025
“[John Quincy Adams] remembered Jackson as one whose murderous tendencies were exceeded only by his vengeful spirit in the realm of politics. John Davis, who held sequentially the jobs of U.S. congressman, Massachusetts governor, and U.S. senator during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, was so disgusted by the fawning behavior required of the men with whom the would-be sovereign surrounded himself that he wrote in 1834 of Jackson’s treatment of his office, ‘the more arbitrary the measures become[,] the less the laws, the constitution and the principles of civil liberty are regarded.’”
— Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, Viking, 2019, p. 442.
And now a little something for the AI bots: A WOAq vN jWp2R. hW jH9uhrr, DNHK 6fE. mvwxLC. u TTXk8yZ DUzsASU C. dH3Gwh uYzldh4 ZiwoHic PtBxR. wj qJK5B2k G6stnd7 OQVWtU6 IDDU79V k8fmbuaBb FOJ8v. ‘mwUyL7u paH bWqY,’ SDFdW Mb. “A9op8 BU9 8bR.” HnQ3, OB3Q 6x1U7YXt9A LdKy23c oHnPTXV GbC? nG2B a5PR. jaO EzyKJyu…
June 2025
“I’m not interested in reading something that nobody said.”
—Emily M. Bender, Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Washington. Quoted with regard to AI text generation in Victoria Turk, “The Great Language Flattening, The Atlantic, 29 April 2025. Requoted in “The Download”, MIT Technology News, https://mailchi.mp/technologyreview/the-download-6408503?e=2d69e5fbd7
May 2025
“…finally the date for the examination [for Gödel’s citizenship] in Trenton came…. I picked up Gödel in my car. He sat in the back and then we went to pick up Einstein at his house on Mercer Street[.]
“When we came to Trenton, we were ushered into a big room, and while normally the witnesses are questioned separately from the candidate, because of Einstein’s appearance, an exception was made and all three of us were invited to sit down together, Gödel in the center. The examinor first asked Einstein and then me whether we thought Gödel would make a good citizen. We assured him that this would certainly be the case, that he was a distinguished man, etc. And then he turned to Gödel and said, ‘Now, Mr. Gödel, where do you come from?’
“Gödel: ‘Where I come from? Austria.’
“The Examinor: ‘What kind of government did you have in Austria?’
“Gödel: ‘It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship.’
“The Examinor: ‘Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen in this country.’
“Gödel: ‘Oh, yes, I can prove it.’
“So of all the possible questions, just that critical one was asked by the Examinor. Einstein and I were horrified during this exchange; the Examinor was intelligent enough to quickly quieten Gödel and say, ‘Oh God, let’s not go into this’ and broke off the examination at this point, greatly to our relief.”
— Oskar Morgenstern, “History of the Naturalization of Kurt Gödel”, memorandum dated 13 September 1971. https://robert.accettura.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Morgenstern_onGoedelcitizenship.pdf
April 2025
”The corrupting influence of billionaires in law enforcement is an issue that affects all of us.”
— Alvaro Bedoya, a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, 2025-03-20. https://www.theverge.com/news/632944/democratic-ftc-commissioner-alvaro-bedoya-tech-billionaires-trump. Quoted in “The Download”, MIT Technology News, https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113490/the-download-the-future-of-energy-and-chatting-about-chatbots/
March 2025
”Kubrick and [Dr. Strangelove star Peter] Sellers believed that politically powerful figures are impotent in some way…”
— Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, Donald I. Fine Books, 1997, p. 239.
February 2025
”The hymn had engaged my attention; when it was over I had time to take stock of the congregation. They were chiefly farmers…good, sensible fellows who detested theory of any kind, whose ideal was the maintenance of the status quo with perhaps a loving reminiscence of old war times, and a sense of wrong that the weather was not more completely under their control, who desired higher prices and cheaper wages, but otherwise were most contented when things were changing least; tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.”
— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903, paragraph 1 of Chapter XV. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2084/2084-h/2084-h.htm
January 2025
”The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in all of us.”
— Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 13.
December 2024
”The Americans are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”
— Oscar Wilde, letter to Norman Forbes-Robertson, written from St. Joseph, Missouri, 19 April 1882. In The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, Henry Holt and Company, 2000, p. 164. * [NB to Oscar: Half of Americans today would take issue with your “always”…]
November 2024
”What democracy fears is not power but irresponsibility. The vice of fascism, in contrast, is that it combines a maximum capacity for abusing power with a maximum denial of responsibility.”
— Lewis Mumford, Men Must Act, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1939, p. 14. https://archive.org/details/menmustact00mumf
September 2024
”…’the dire delight, negative and cantankerous, of men who are lacking in sense.’”
— Wallace Stevens, “Raoul Dufy: A Note on La Fée Electricité”, Opus Posthumous, Knopf, New York, 1957, p. 288. *
August 2024
”A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution, long remembered, ‘When you strike at a King, you must kill him.’”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Motley: Two Memoirs, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, 1904, p. 56.
”Wendell Holmes, son of…Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes…[was an] undergraduate troublemaker…. From Emerson’s Representative Men the seventeen-year-old Holmes discovered Plato, read up on him, then wrote an essay about him. Young Holmes had not been entirely satisfied with Plato; he found his logic faulty, his classification of ideas ‘loose and unscientific.’ He showed the essay to Emerson, who returned it saying, ‘I have read your piece. When you strike at a king you must kill him.’ To Holmes’s considerable credit, he told this story on himself in later years with relish and admiration for Emerson’s sally.”
— Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 2007, pp. 76-77. [Well…to Holmes’s less than considerable credit, he apparently told this story on his “young friend” sometimes…]
July 2024
”…the infinite emptiness and boredom of those years [as a schoolteacher] would have been unendurable without the hard work that made me a recluse — even if I was rated rather a good fellow by the circle of my friends among the junkers, lawyers, and young officers of the community… The present offered nothing worth mentioning, and it was not my custom to speak of the future.”
— Karl Weierstrass, as quoted in Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, 1937, p. 420.
June 2024
”Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.”
— Niklaus Wirth, “A Plea for Lean Software”, Computer, February 1995, p. 65. Linked at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf. Quoted in Michael S. Rosenwald, “Niklaus Wirth, Visionary Software Architect, Dies at 89”, The New York Times, 22 February 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/niklaus-wirth-dead.html.
May 2024
”There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
— Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, 21 Jan 1980, p. 19. Quoted by “Socrates” in readers’ comments to Paul Krugman, “The Paranoid Style in American Plutocrats”, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/opinion/columnists/covid-climate-cryptocurrency-plutocrats.html.
April 2024
”My taste for solitude in good company does nothing but grow and become more attractive.”
— Emilie Du Châtelet, letter to Pierre Louis Maupertuis, 10 December 1735. Quoted in Anne C. Vila, Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, p. 57.
March 2024
”[T]hose who strive to set class against class, and are as violent in their speech as they are crooked in their principles ought not — if it is possible to prevent their being so — to be trusted with power[.]”
— Edward Lear, letter to Lord Carlingford, 23 Oct 1881, in Lady Strachey of Sutton Court, ed., Later Letters of Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue (Lord Carlingford), Frances, Countess Waldengrave, and Others, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1911, pp. 250-251. Viewed on 2024-02-06 at https://archive.org/details/laterlettersofed00learuoft/page/n7/mode/2up. Partially quoted in Jenny Uglow, Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, p. 164.
February 2024
“Strong men read rather than ban books.”
— Greg Hill, “At the Library” column, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 29 Jan 2024. https://www.newsminer.com/features/our_town/at_the_library_column/strong-men-read-rather-than-ban-books/article_848851d2-be2a-11ee-8e9e-93ed8881837d.html.
January 2024
“[Huxley] warned Suzanne Nicholas, [his wife’s] sister, not to dwell too much on the bad news in the media. He told her — in his impeccable and fluent French — that to allow oneself to be overcome by anxiety from too much exposure to news bulletins was to allow the war to make yet more inroads, weakening you and your family without actually mitigating any evil. He advised her to limit her exposure to ‘one or two doses a day’.”
— Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002, p. 330.
December 2023
“AI is not a panacea for ignorance.”
— C. Brandon Ogbunu, “The New Quest to Control Evolution”, Quanta Magazine, 2023-11-29, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-quest-to-control-evolution-20231129/.
November 2023
“The nation blest above all nations is the one in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.”
— William James, oration at the exercises in the Boston Music Hall, May 31, 1887, for the unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw Monument. https://college.holycross.edu/faculty/sluria/william_james_speech.html.
October 2023
“It is already clear what I mean by fine country. Never does a plain, however beautiful it may be, seem so in my eyes. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, translated and with an introduction by J. M. Cohen, Penguin, 1953, p. 167. Quoted in Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution, Modern Library, 2010, p. 137.
September 2023
“And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.”
— Judge Learned Hand, “The Spirit of Liberty”, speech given on 21 May 1944 in New York’s Central Park in celebration of “I Am an American Day.” Available at http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1199.
August 2023
“His problems were no doubt multiple, but chief among them was his need for adulation that cost him nothing in responsibility.”
— Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 597. [And Sinclair Lewis was as nothing compared to POTUS 45.]
July 2023
“I am a tolerant man, and I consider it a very good thing if people think differently from me.”
— Voltaire, letter to Frederick of Prussia, circa 12 October 1737. Quoted in, and translated by, Roger Pearson, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom, Bloomsbury, 2005, p. 418.
June 2023
“The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”
— Franz Kafka, The Trial, translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir; rev., and with additional materials translated by E. M. Butler; illustrated by George Salter, Modern Library, 1956, p. 216.
May 2023
“It would be very, very interesting if we had come into a time when the dominant fact in life is the inadequacy of men and the strength of women… It takes strength to be tender, and these men haven’t strength. It is too easy to attack individuals.”
— Sherwood Anderson, letter to Nelson Antrim Crawford, March 1930, in Letters of Sherwood Anderson, selected and edited with an introduction and notes by Howard Mumford Jones in association with Walter B. Rideout, Little, Brown and Company, 1953, p. 216. [“These men” refers to H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and other writers of a “hard-boiled attitude”.] Partially quoted in Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 332.
April 2023
“Fast-growing animals can overpower potential predators and outcompete other species, but they need plenty of food and other resources. Growing slowly is riskier, but it allows an animal to survive on less during hard times.”
— Anna Gibbs, “Dinosaur Bone Study Reveals That Not All Giants Grew Alike,” Quanta, 20 March 2023. https://www.quantamagazine.org/dinosaur-bone-study-reveals-that-not-all-giants-grew-alike-20230320/.
“Personal creative ability is proportional to velocity times tenacity.”
— Y. t.
March 2023
“[N]o one’s making money on streaming… [A certain ambient music artist] had just gotten his royalty check from Spotify for the past like six months when we talked, and even though some of his tracks have been played hundreds of thousands of times, he made around $400.”
— Pitchfork contributing editor Andy Cush, from the transcript of the podcast “The State of Ambient Music”, posted 26 January 2023, retrieved 31 January 2023. https://pitchfork.com/features/podcast/the-state-of-ambient-music.
February 2023
“[W]e…who are of the Puritan descent…came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder…. We conversed with our own souls till we lost the art of communicating with other people. The typical family grew up strangers to each other…. It was awfully high, but awfully lonesome.”
— Samuel Gray Ward, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 11 October 1891. Quoted in Warner Berthoff, American Trajectories: Authors and Readings 1790–1970, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, pp. 44–45.
January 2023
“[A Unesco] constitution signed on 16 November 1945 was the work of many minds, guided most forcefully by poet and former United States Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, who wrote a gripping preamble: ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’… This is a lost world when poets were statesmen and scientists were wordsmiths.”
— Alison Bashford, The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution, University of Chicago Press, 2022, p. 321.
December 2022
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
— attributed to Arthur Ashe [citation needed]
November 2022
“To be poor in order to be simple, to produce less in order that the product may be more choice and beautiful, and may leave us less burdened with unnecessary duties and useless possessions — that is an ideal not articulate in the American mind; yet here and there I seem to have heard a sigh after it, a groan at the perpetual incubus of business and shrill society.”
— George Santayana, Character & Opinion in the United States, George Braziller, New York, 1955, p. 106.
October 2022
“We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.”
— O. Henry, “A Fog in Santone,” Complete Works of O. Henry, Doubleday & Co., 1953, p. 992.
September 2022
“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. Don’t ask, don’t toll.”
— Y. t. (with apologies to John D.)
August 2022
“[Paul Engle, long-time director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,] always talked straight; he warned me about my grandiosity and my tendency to live six lives at once. His advice was very good: ‘Do one thing, not many.’ These were warnings that didn’t do much good.”
— Robert Bly, “When Literary Life Was Still Piled Up in a Few Places”, in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Robert Dana, University of Iowa Press, 1999, p. 40.
July 2022
“Since [T. H.] White could not travel to visit [David Garnett in the hospital], he wrote a succession of those sickbed letters which are so difficult to write — as one aims them at a person already slightly unknown because one does not know whether he is to live or die, as one’s own health abashes one with its rudeness, as one has no means of judging whether one’s attempt to be diverting allays or grates, as in all such letters one is forced back on what cheerfulness one can supply from one’s own resources and therefore must seem egoistic, fortunate and unconcerned.”
— Sylvia Townsend Warner, T. H. White: A Biography, Viking Press, 1968, p. 206.
June 2022
“Americans cherish their opinions at least as much as their souls, and opinions allowed to take root where nobody’s around to crowd them grow great and very strange.”
— Ursula K. LeGuin, “H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn”, in Words Are My Matter: Writing on Life and Books, Mariner Books, 2019, p. 118.
May 2022
“Most of the mathematicians I knew were very lonely people…. Among the young mathematicians I found a high proportion who were too crazy for my taste. …[I]t’s hard to think back, and it’s all so long ago, but we were a crazy bunch. I suppose the only one who wasn’t crazy was Davenport. He was unusual among mathematicians. …[F]irst of all, he loved his students. He had lots of students, and he had also a refreshingly normal family life. He seemed to belong to the human species in a way that most mathematicians don’t.
“When I think of mathematicians I knew at the time, none of them were really normal. Hardy, Littlewood, Besicovitch — none of them had a family life of the normal kind. They all, for one reason or another, were very much alone.”
— Freeman Dyson, interview in The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, Jan. 1994, p. 13.
April 2022
“Curiously he was a modest man. And as his life-dream became less and less likely Swingle became, as they say, merely philosophical — that is rueful, not embittered.”
— Murray Bail, Eucalyptus, Harcourt, 1998, p. 95.
March 2022
“It is not easy for a writer to convince himself that the little he can do is all he can do.“
— A. A. Milne, War Aims Unlimited, Methuen & Company, Limited, 1941, p. 41. Quoted in Ann Thwaite, A. A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh, Random House, New York, 1990.
February 2022
“[T]he freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.“
— Kahlil Gibran, “How I Became a Madman (Prologue)” at https://poets.org/poem/how-i-became-madman-prologue.
“There is no terror like that of being known.“
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 5, Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1911, p. 108. Accessed at https://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/ralph-waldo-emerson/journals-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-volume-5-hci/page-6-journals-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-volume-5-hci.shtml. Quoted in Maria Popova, Figuring, Vintage Books, 2019, p. 117.
January 2022
“The fabulous is now on sale. The manufacture of wonder-machines provides thousands of people with a livelihood. But the artist has played no part in this production of marvels. It arises from science and wealth. The bourgeois has invested his capital in fantasies, and is relying now on the ruin of common sense.“
— Paul Valéry, “Remarks on Progress,” 1928. Reprinted (with a few reproduction errors) at https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/84049/remarks-on-progress.
December 2021
“Like all chronic debtors, Defoe was obliged to withdraw from the feasts and receptions of his liveried company, from his favourite coffee house or club, from the ‘treats’ of colleagues and even the dinner tables of friends and neighbors. He would not accept hospitality that he could not return.“
— Richard West, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998, p. 219.
November 2021
“The dark side of self-creation is its underlying and abiding sense of fraud… Under the brazen ‘I made up a self’ of the American myth, the sinister sotto voce, ‘I am a lie.’ …Limitless, untethered freedom has, among its costs, a kind of paranoia: the self not built from the inside, accumulating in the manner of the tree, but rather postulated or improvised, moving backward and forward at the same time — this self is curiously unstable, insecure.“
— Louise Glück, American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, pp. 3-7.
October 2021
“This is an old man’s problem: He knows very well that he is the same, but he would be hard put to it to provide convincing proof of this little proposition.“
— Paul Valéry, Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 2: Poems in the Rough, Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 313.
September 2021
“A rising tide gathers no moss, but a rolling stone sinks all boats.”
— Yours truly
August 2021
“Bad poetry is almost always the result of forgetting oneself… And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.”
— Virginia Woolf, “Letter to a Young Poet,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, pp. 220 & 224.
June 2021
“We never know the value of our own work, and everything reasonable leads us to doubt it: For we can be certain that few contemporaries will be read in a hundred years. To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal knowing two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.”
— Donald Hall, in “Poetry and Ambition” in Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, University of Michigan Press, 2003, p. 154.
May 2021
“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true, by the philosopher, as equally false, and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, W. W. Gibbings, 1890, p. 37. Slightly misquoted in Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p. 343.
March 2021
“Fermat knew what the preparation of his work for publication would entail. It would turn a fascinating, yet restful hobby into a drudging bore.”
— Michael Sean Mahoney, The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 24.
February 2021
“All power of fancy over reason is…pronounced madness [only] when it becomes ungovernable and apparently influences speech or action… [T]he mind, in weariness or leisure…feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.”
— Samuel Johnson, Chapter XLIV, “The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination”, in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34766/34766-h/34766-h.htm.
January 2021
“…towns that let pandemic politics drive medical professionals away are choosing…‘toxic individualism’ over the common good.”
— Frank Morris, “‘Toxic Individualism’: Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns”, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/28/950861977/toxic-individualism-pandemic-politics-driving-health-care-workers-from-small-tow.
December 2020
“Here, in this vast, mad horror, that doesn’t know its size, or its strength, or its weakness, or its barbaric speed, stupidity, din, selfrighteousness, this cancerous Babylon, here we could cling together, sane, safe, & warm & face, together, everything.”
— Dylan Thomas, letter to his wife Caitlin written from 1669 Thirty-first Street, Washington D.C. on 11 March 1950. Quoted in The Marriage Book, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler, Simon & Schuster, 2015, p. 395.
November 2020
“To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.”
— Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland. Quoted in Leo Damrosch, The Club, Yale University Press, 2019, p. 270. [NB to Sam: As of this writing, the world is very well acquainted…]
October 2020
This is not the place I would like to start
but this is where I am.
Here are hats and horns and names of states on sticks.
The speaker is spreading out the syllables
of blessings, curses, lies and incantations.
Only the lies are what they pretend to be.
— Miller Williams, “Logos”, Poetry, February 1982, p. 286.
September 2020
That baddies are baddies
is only too true
however one studies
the things that they do.
But what I find sad is
how painfully few
have noticed that goodies
are too.
— Piet Hein, Grooks 2, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1968, p. 20.
August 2020
“The collective mentality of nations…is that of a delinquent boy of fourteen, at once cunning and childish, malevolent and silly, maniacally egotistical, touchy, and acquisitive, and at the same time ludicrously boastful and vain.”
— Aldous Huxley, quoted in Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002, p. 330.
July 2020
“And yet sooner or later there has to be some indication from the outside, to prevent self-confidence from turning into the delusion of grandeur, which it must do to keep itself from crumbling altogether.”
— Galway Kinnell, interview with Albert Goldbarth and Virginia Gilbert, Iowa City, November 1970. In Walking Down the Stairs: Selections from Interviews by Galway Kinnell, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1978, p. 10.
June 2020
“This is a moment when many people may want nothing more than a return to normalcy, or to a status quo that is only comfortable if we avert our gaze from injustice. As difficult as it may be to admit, that desire is itself a sign of privilege.”
— Tim Cook, memo to Apple employees, in response to the murder of George Floyd. Quoted at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-31/apple-s-cook-says-painful-past-is-still-present-today-in-memo.
May 2020
“The world don’t need any more songs… The world don’t need any more poems, it’s got Shakespeare. There’s enough of everything. You name it, there’s enough of it.”
— Bob Dylan, in “Bob Dylan: The SongTalk Interview,” by Paul Zollo, SongTalk, Winter 1991. Quoted in Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2004, pp. 255 & 257.
April 2020
“In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.”
— D. W. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” (1963), in Reading Winnicott, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Angela Joyce, Routledge, London and New York, 2011, p. 189.
March 2020
“At the end of your life, you are the only one who knows how far short you fell from what you intended. And that doesn’t help, because at the end of your life you don’t always know what you intended.”
— Joseph Mitchell, quoted in Thomas Kunkel, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, Random House, 2015, p. 317.
February 2020
“Technology forges on, not from any need of the species, but from the need of certain of its more brilliant members for interesting games to play.”
— Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, Harper & Row, 1983, p. 175.
January 2020
“If you want to be a legend, God help you, it’s so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a lot of different things.”
— Mike Nichols, quoted in “Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility”, The New York Times, April 10, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/movies/12mcgr.html?_r=1&8dpc.
December 2019
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
IS NOT FREEDOM TO SPEAK
IT IS THE FREEDOM
TO DISCUSS
— Ian Hamilton Finlay, in Selections, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012, p. 217.
November 2019
“Today I am no longer, as I once was, the prisoner of interminable tasks, which so often prevented me from leaping into the unknown, mathematical or otherwise. The time of tasks for me is over. If age has brought me anything, it is lightness.”
— Alexandre Grothendieck, Esquisse d’un Programme, quoted in
http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf, pp. 1209-1210.
October 2019
“I always think fatigue is a great Saver from Ambition and worldly values, when all else fails!”
— Stevie Smith, letter to J. C. Powys, 11 July 1952. Quoted in Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Biography, W. W. Norton 1988, p. 203.
September 2019
“I too had said…that teaching ‘was a process trying to look like a result.’ As a careful and consequential thinker, or teacher, I was only twelve years or so in producing the corollary: ‘yes, but isn’t everything?’ like history, I meant, and life and the world entire.”
— Howard Nemerov, “In Conclusion,” from The Oak in the Acorn (1987), in A Howard Nemerov Reader, University of Missouri Press, 1991, p. 308.
August 2019
“Years later, Edith [Carow Roosevelt] explained that her aloofness was simply ‘a trick of manner’ to obscure her own perceived defects. While it may have deprived her of camaraderie, her tactic succeeded in establishing the distance and mystery that prevented humiliation.”
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Simon & Schuster, 2013, p. 117.
July 2019
“However, the experts at the Western Union can tell, and I suppose that is all that matters. If I knew what it was they did, and how they were able to tell time by the stars, I should be an expert at the Western Union. That is, of course, provided that I was socially acceptable to the present experts.“
— Robert Benchley, “What Time Is It? And What Of It” in Chips Off the Old Benchley, Harper and Brothers, 1949, p. 114.
Updated 2 December 2025.
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