Society and the World

E pluribus unus .

[ Of Lucretius :] Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas .

Arma virumque cano .

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes .

Frères humains, qui après nous vivez ,

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words are used to disguise, notto illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Science, my lad, has been built upon manyerrors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

Except for God, the King’s our only lord and master.

At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?

Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles .

To say that war is madness is like sayingthat sex is madness: true enough, from thestandpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporaryarrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passedthrough, and they milked you for what youwere worth, mostly when you were young andgullible.

I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.

A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

Let me make the superstitions of a nationand I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.