“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”
Henry David Thoreau to his graduating class at Harvard, 1837, cited by Wendell Berry in a sermon reprinted in Harpers magazine March 1988
“A ship wrecked sailor, buried on this coast/ Bids you set sail./ Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,/ Weathered the gale.”
“a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology” quoted in William James, Pragmatism and four essays from The Meaning of Truth
In my latest Epoch Times column I say that early efforts to shut down debate over the increasingly plausible man-made origins of COVID just underline why free speech is important… at the very moment that Google and YouTube move on to efforts to suppress free debate on climate change.
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
“For everywhere, above and below, you will find nothing but the selfsame things; they fill the pages of all history, ancient, modern, and contemporary; and they fill our cities and homes today. There is no such thing as novelty; all is as trite as it is transitory.”
Marcus Aurelius Meditations VII.1
“If you cannot prevent your enemies from swallowing you whole, at least you must do what you can to prevent them from digesting you.”
“Rousseau’s famous charge to the Poles” quoted by George Weigel in Witness to Hope (saying that in World War II it “was tested as never before.”)
“There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.”
Montaigne, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go
“Surely what matters in a dogma – religious, political or any other kind – is not the motive of those who advance it, but whether it is true or false.”
Ted and Virginia Byfield in “Orthodoxy” in British Columbia Report August 18, 1997