Past and Future

"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past."

- G. K. Chesterton

Minds

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"
- Allen Ginsberg

"I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats."
- Theodore Dalrymple

Save the Earth

You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice.

- Dogbert

John Maynard Keynes on Bertrand Russell

Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally.

Uhh....

Having sex with your neighbor's goat is a lot like violating a copyright. It's totally victimless, right?

- Scott Adams

(oh, Scott Adams...)

Ben Franklin On Meat Eating

Our People set about catching Cod, & haul’d up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on this Occasion, I consider’d … the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem’d very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smeled admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle & Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.


Both this and the previous quote were from this New Yorker article. Interesting stuff.

Scottish Selkirk Grace

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.


I think this will be my motto for meat eating from now on. :)

Ancient and Modern

"The Confucian says: ' The superior man must be ancient in mode of speech and in dress before he can be magnanimous.' We answer him: The so-called ancient speech and dress were all modern once. When the ancients first used that speech and wore that dress they would not be superior men (according to the Confucians' criteria)."

- Mozi, "Against Confucianism"