Reese's Half-Hidden Quote Blog

Art is anything you can get away with.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected.

Time is money--says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it around, and you get a precious truth--money is time. I think of it in these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor I could not afford that heartsome blaze how different the whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune? Money is time.

Ubi panis, ibi patria.

Therefore it's likely that two kinds of mentality--the skeptical and the Utopian--will survive separately, in unavoidable conflict. And we need their shaky coexistence; both of them are important to our culturural survival. The victory of Utopian dreams would lead us to a totalitarian nightmare and the utter downfall of civilization, whereas the unchallenged domination of the skeptical spirit would condemn us to a hopeless stagnation, to an immobility that a slight accident could easily convert into catastrophic chaos. Ultimately we have to live between two irreconcilable claims, each of them having its cultural justification.

Nor do I lend books. If I want someone to read a book, I'll buy a copy and offer it as a gift. I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft.

It was written that reading too many newspapers was poison for someone who aimed to achieve some intellectual goal.

What he did is incomprehensible, but where is it written we have to understand everything?

If you are not going to change your route, why change your guide?

Our vacillations bear the mark of our probity; our assurances, of our imposture. A thinker's untruthfulness may be recognized by the sum of precise ideas he advances.

In my early days I was passionately polemical, now I can only expound, silence is my only weapon of offense.

No matter how much sadness there may be in this unfathomable world, it remains wonderful.

A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor, in a full possession of all the necessities, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality is most suitable to human nature.

If change is not necessary, it is necessary not to change.

To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency toward reversion may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert upon humanity.

I believe there is such a thing as being too reasonable. But when once the habit is formed, what is one to do?

Tout ce que est simple est faux. Tout ce que ne l'est pas est inutilisable.

Truth lies not at extremes but in the middle.

  Prove Hamlet wrong.

  I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.