“An egotist is a man who thinks that if he hadn’t been born, people would have wondered why.”
Dan Post, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com
“It’s funny, he thought. I’m always sure things are going to turn out badly, and, damn it, they usually do.”
Tom Rath's internal monologue in Sloan Wilson The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
Question from a student: “I’m scared of metaphysics. A friend of mine wrote an essay for another course, in which he denied the persistence of personal identity. According to my friend, since some things about me have changed during the last two years, the me of today isn’t the same as the me of two years ago. We are literally different persons. This is deeply disturbing."
Reply: "... if my personal identity has no persistence, then how could ‘I’ find it disturbing? The problem with your friend’s argument isn’t metaphysical reasoning, but flawed metaphysical reasoning... there must be a real you that persists through the changes. If that weren’t true, then it wouldn’t even make sense for you to say “I have changed” -- because at the moment of the change, “I” would have ceased to exist.... Metaphysics is just thinking carefully about what the real world is like.... Trust me. You exist.”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" July 22, 2019
“That’s getting the worst of both ends of the stick.”
Announcer on Monday Night Football Oct. 12, 1992 (re a guy getting called for a personal foul his teammate actually committed)
“Maturity is knowing when to be immature"
Greg Hall, not otherwise identified, quoted in a reader-submitted "Thought du Jour" in their contest seeking same, in Globe & Mail Oct. 31, 2002
“when people do not have a satisfactory narrative to generate a sense of purpose and continuity, a kind of psychic disorientation takes hood, followed by a frantic search for something to believe in or, probably worse, a resigned conclusion that there is nothing to find…. There is even one group… who, looking ahead, see a field of wonders encapsulated in the phrase ‘the information superhighway.’ They are information junkies, have no interest in narratives of the past, give little thought to the question of purpose…. Such people have no hesitation in speaking of building a bridge to the new century. But to the question ‘What will we carry across the bridge?’ they answer, ‘What else but high-definition TV, virtual reality, e-mail, the Internet, cellular phones, and all the rest that digital technology has produced?’ These, then, are the hollow men Eliot spoke of.”
Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
“theories [should] be examined for their implications for observable behaviour, and these specific implications compared with observable behaviour.”
George Stigler in 1950, quoted in Steven N.S. Cheung, The Myth of Social Cost: A critique of welfare economics and the implications for public policy (Hobart Paper 82 from the Institute for Economic Affairs, 1979)
“The things I like arguing about are absolute things; whether a proof is logical or whether a practice is just.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 17, 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)