“for the first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“He who has seen the present has seen everything, said Marcus Aurelius...”
Andrei Navrozov in Chronicles magazine June 1991
“Experience teaches us that nothing stands so much in the way of developing great philosophers as the custom of supporting mediocre ones in state universities…. No state would ever dare to patronize such men as Plato and Schopenhauer… The state is always afraid of them.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator” quoted in Will Durant The Story of Philosophy
“The question of the existence of God is the single most important question we face about the nature of reality…. Neither question [does the concept of a personal God make sense and should we believe in one] is easy to answer. God is a different kind of being from any other that we might speak about.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“Life is a business that doesn’t cover its costs.”
Schopenhauer, quoted in Martin Heidegger An Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger did not agree, but said in recent centuries it had been treated like one)
“The term nearest to being synonymous with pleasure is volition: what it pleases a man to do, or what he pleases to do, may be far from giving him enjoyment; yet shall we say that in doing it, he is not following his own pleasure?… A native of Japan, when he is offended, stabs himself to prove the intensity of his feelings. It is difficult to prove enjoyment in this case: yet the man obeyed his impulses.”
John Hill Burton, “Bentham’s editor”, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism and sourced to Jeremy Bentham’s Works, vol. I
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the mania for booster shots for vaccines that don’t work very well to stop a variant they may not work against at all is not science.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason public officials pivot ataxically from one certainty to another on SARS-CoV-2 (yes, that’s the virus) is that the public won’t accept that the government doesn’t have all the answers.