“it is low-class not to do one’s best...”
Nika Hazelton in National Review December 11, 1995
“Have you heard this line? ‘Now that we know about brain physiology, it’s obvious that there could be no such thing as free will.’ That’s like saying that the circuitry of a cellphone determines the conversations which takes place on it.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” August 26, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/telephones-and-free-will].
“Stereotyping – how like an Anglo.”
Me regarding Quebec reactions to RoC reactions to the Adscam scandal, March 2004.
“Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: ‘Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.’”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“Germany, which had been united as recently as 1871 and within one generation had become an awesome industrial and military power, was, on the eve of war [World War I], the foremost representative of innovation and renewal. She was, among nations, the very embodiment of vitalism and technical brilliance. The war for her was to be war of liberation, a Befreiungskrieg, from the hypocrisy of bourgeois form and convenience, and Britain was to her the principal representative of the order against which she was rebelling. Britain was in fact the major conservative power of the fin-de-siècle world.”
Author’s “Preface” in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The two strategies for ending the culture war – incremental restrictions, and ‘leaving it up to the states’ – have a history. In the 1800s, the Democratic Party wanted to leave slavery up to the states. In those days too Democrats were ‘pro-choice,’ but about slavery, not abortion. In those days too they thought ‘leaving it up to the states’ would end their culture war. That hope was futile. It didn’t end the culture war over slavery, but only prolonged and inflamed it. Eventually we had a real war which nobody wanted. ‘Leaving it up to the states’ won’t end the culture war over abortion, any more than it ended the culture war over slavery. As slavery exercised a malignant influence on our politics and culture then, so abortion exercises a beastly influence on our politics and culture today. Ironically, in our time the mantle of ‘leaving it up to the states’ has been taken up not by Democrats, but by the Republicans. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is treated as an excuse to drop the whole issue. I am not surprised that the Democrats of our own day take ‘joy,’ as they say, in the liberty to kill children, but I am gravely disappointed that the Trump/Vance campaign is repeating the mistakes which the other party made over slavery. One would have hoped that they would take their inspiration not from Stephen Douglas, but from his opponent Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, we are listening.”
J Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” September 9, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/ending-the-culture-war-over-abortion]
“Overall, the results showed that incompetence is even worse than it appears to be and forms a sort of holy trinity of cluelessness. The incompetent don’t perform up to speed; don’t recognize their own lack of competence; and don’t even recognize the competence of other people.”
A Guardian summary of the seminal Justin Kruger and David Dunning study Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing ones own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, quoted by Mike Jenkinson in the Ottawa Sun May 31, 2004
“There is an important distinction in life, including work life, between things you want to have done and things you want to be doing.”
Another of mine, from Feb. 12, 1988