Category: VAULT Quotes

Freedom

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
–H. L. Mencken

All is Quite

Two of my favorite literary quotes of all time come from “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque. I ran into them a couple days ago and thought I would share:

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”

–Chapter 10

“The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.”

–Chapter 12

and what did he ever do for us?

“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossiblity in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”
–Babbage

As said with regard to his Analytical Engine, thus becoming the world’s first programmer.

Something Understood

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. …something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.
–Phaedrus Reborn, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

Harmony of Self

But in reality Justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others,-he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which maybe compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals-when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or, private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and cooperates with the harmonious condition, just and good action and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.
–Socrates, The Republic

Fear & Love

Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others…
-Niccolo Machiavelli