Quotes: 6 August 2026
Potpourri
History, once again, is a series of hinges. Even if the trends are bad, as I have certainly enumerated, better and worse outcomes are always available.
A stunningly simple and—=should be—obvious truth. Binary thinking often proves a curse.
Action by definition lacks the subtlety of intellectual argument. And while the leader will be judged in hindsight, at the moment he acts he knows only the facts as they are available to him. While the evidence will be at best partial, the decisions that arise from it are irrevocable. This is why bravery is intimately connected with leadership.
The real value of the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime is that it can be handed on to future generations. Our society, however, has lost this conception of wisdom and knowledge. It holds an instrumental view of knowledge, according to which technological change constantly renders knowledge obsolete and therefore nontransferable.
Environmental degradation comes in just the same way that moral degradation comes, through representing people and places in impersonal ways, as objects to be used rather than as subjects to be respected. The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable.
Our civilization (now virtually worldwide) tends far too much to be users rather than serving as caretakers.
In the eyes of a contemporary journalist [in the 1920s], the Klan was “the most vigorous, active, and effective force in American life, outside business.”
Every utterance reveals something of the melting pot of desire, culture, background, worldview, status, social codes, gender, subconscious fears and upbringing – the crucible from whence they came.
The US political scientist Robert A. Pape examined the demography of the 377 Americans arrested following the January 6th Insurrection. Besides being 95 percent White and significantly older than your typical protestor, the group displayed a strikingly similar background: “Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists.” This is nostalgia weaponized per the logic of the Great Replacement Theory.
Families are founded as shelters and mighty fortresses in an inhospitable, alien world, into which we want to introduce kinship. This desire leads to the fundamental perversion of politics, because it abolishes the basic quality of plurality, or rather forfeits it by introducing the concept of kinship.
The problem with the “fraternity” in the French motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!”?
The Cambridge Companion to the Federalist
Jack N. Rakove and Colleen A. Sheehan
To Hamilton the key to a functioning fiscal system was always to minimize friction, to employ methods of taxation that were considered legitimate by the taxpayers and therefore gave rise to no opposition. “It might be demonstrated,” Hamilton said at one point, “that the most productive system of finance will always be the least burthensome.” Duties on trade constituted such a system as long as they avoided taxing basic consumer items. The citizen-taxpayers could then choose either to buy an item and pay the duty levied on it or abstain from consumption and not pay the tax. In other words, there was a voluntary element to such tax administration, which accorded well with republican ideas of rule by consent.
For “duties,” you can read “tariffs.”
To move from a focus on things as the ultimately important constituents of reality, to one in which processes are the important entities, requires a shift in our perception of space. We relinquish the idea of causation as strictly ‘bottom up’, from parts to wholes: we come to accept that whole systems contribute to the properties of their parts. The first is the only one that makes sense to the left hemisphere; in its view the whole can be understood only if we understand the parts. It takes the right hemisphere to understand that the parts can be understood only in the light of the whole.