‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
— Thomas Jefferson (in correspondence)
The light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.
— Les Miserables
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.
— Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
The Monuments that mightie Monarches reare,Colosso’s statues, and Pyramids high,
In tract of time, doe moulder downe and weare,
Ne leave they any little memorie,
The Passenger may warned be to say,
They had their being here, another day.
But wise wordes taught, in numbers sweet to runne,
Preserved by the living Muse for aie,
Shall still abide, when date of these is done,
Nor ever shall by Time be worne away:
Time, Tyrants, Envie, World assay thy worst,
Ere Homer die, thou shalt be fired first.
If a man be wealthy, no matter how he gets it, of what parentage, how qualified, how virtuously endowed or villainously inclined; let him be a bawd, a gripe, a usurer, a villain, a pagan, a barbarian, a wretch, Lucian’s tyrant, “on whom you may look with less security than on the sun”; so that he be rich (and liberal withal) he shall be honoured, admired, adored, reverenced, and highly magnified.
— Anatomy of Melancholy
Syracuse started flat, with used-car dealers and junkyards. Then came stucco bars and appliance stores in converted clapboard houses. It was late Friday afternoon, with rush hour and week-end traffic starting to overlap. Parker pushed the Olds through the traffic, making the best time he could. South Salina Street. The stores got taller and older, the traffic heavier, till they were downtown, where all the streets were one way the wrong way.”I hate this city,” Parker said.
”It’s a city,” Handy replied. “They’re all like this.”
”I hate them all, then.
— Richard Stark, The Outfit
If a man have neither wife nor other to rule his household, know you how it is with the house? I know, and will tell you. If he be rich, and have plenty of grain, the sparrows and the moles eat their fill thereof. It is not set in order, but all so scattered abroad that the whole house is the fouler for it. If he have oil, it is all neglected and spilt; when the jars break and the oil is spilled, he casts a little earth on the spot, and all is done! In his bed, know you how he sleeps? He lies in a pit, with the sheets as they chance to have tumbled upon the bed; and they are never changed until they are torn. Even so in his dining-hall; here on the ground are melon-rinds, bones, and salad leaves, everything left lying on the ground without pretense of sweeping. He wipes the trenchers off; the dog licks them; so they are washed. His pipkins are all foul with grease: go and see how they stand! Know you how such a man lives? —even as a brute beast.
— St. Bernardino
He who does not turn up the earth with the plough ought to write the parchment with his fingers.
— St. Ferreol
He made no pretentions to botany, and knew nothing of groups or classification; he did not care in the least to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took no part, either for the utricles or against the cotyledons, or for Jussieu against Linnaeus. He did not study plants, he loved flowers. He had much respect for the learned, but still more for the ignorant; and, while he fulfilled his duty in both these respects, he watered his beds every summer evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.
— Les Miserables
For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.
— Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I, after my death? No. What am I? A little dust, aggregated by an organism. What have I to do on this earth! I have the choice to suffer or to enjoy. Where will suffering lead me? To nothing. But I shall have suffered. Where will enjoyment leave me? To nothing. But I shall have enjoyed. My choice is made. I must eat or be eaten, and I choose to eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass.
— Les Miserables
One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
— Thoreau, Walden
Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyses and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world which surrounds us returns what it receives; it is probable that the contemplators are contemplated.
— Les Miserables
Set not thy foot to make the blind to fall;Nor wilfully offend thy weaker brother:
Nor wound the dead with thy tongue’s bitter gall,
Nor rejoice thou upon the fall of other.
— Pybrac, Quatrains (17th c.)
Then he asked himself:If he were the only one who had done wrong in the course of his fatal history? If, in the first place, it were not a grievous thing that he, a workman, should have been in want of work; that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread. If, moreover, the fault having been committed and avowed, the punishment had not been savage and excessive. If there were not a greater abuse, on the part of the law, in the penalty, than there had been, on the part of the guilty, in the crime.
He questioned himself if human society could have the right alike to crush its members in the one case by its unreasonable carelessness, and in the other by its pitiless care; and to keep a poor man for ever between a lack and an excess, a lack of work, an excess of punishment.
If it were not outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution of wealth that chance had made, and who where, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.
These questions asked and decided, he condemned society and sentenced it.
He sentenced it to his hatred.
— Les Miserables
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