Jun 23, 2006


Honesty is commended, and starves.

Juvenal A.D. 60 – c. 130
(Probitas laudatur et alget.)
( Satires, i. 74. Trans. By Lewis Evans)




Every one is more or less mad on one point.

Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936
(Plain Tales from the Hills. On the Strength of a Likeness

Jun 27, 2006


Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt 1759 – 1806
(Speech, House of Commons, 18 Nov. 1783)

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work they have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
(Speeches and Letters (1907). Address at Dedication of National Cemetery at Gettysburg, 19 Nov. 1863)

Jul 4, 2006

Democracy passes into despotism.
Plato, ergo Socrates c. 429 – 347 B.C.
( Republic, ppt. Iv, bk. Viii. 562. Cornford's translation)


War its thousands slay, Peace its ten thousands.
Beilby Porteus 1731 – 1808
( Death, 1. 179)

Jul 7, 2006


Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
L`homme est n้ libre, et partout il est dans les fers.
( Du Contrat Social, ch. I)

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.

Edward John Phelps 1822 – 1900
( Speech at Mansion House, 24 Jan. 1899)

Whatever, Bojangles.
Andrew Thistlethwaite
(Instructions to Craig, 2006)

A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse, they say.
But why would you do either.
(Unknown)




I will not lament the past – why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill.
S๘ren Kierkegaard 5 May, 1813 – 11 November, 1855
(JPV 5100 (Pap. 1 A 75) August 1, 1835)
As in: The Essential Kierkegaard Eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2000) p. 12

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance – backward.
S๘ren Kierkegaard
(JP I 1030 (Pap. IV A 164) n.d., 1843)
As in: Ibid.

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