Fire and Knowledge

God has spoken to me. I listen to God, and what I’ve heard is that I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party.

–Tom DeLay (source)

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist, that now exists, does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid: and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkman of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation, and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked.

–Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), p. 273

Teaching cannot do well under the cult of innovation. Devotion to the new enforces a devaluation and dismissal of the old, which is necessarily the subject of teaching…. And here we meet a strange and difficult question that may be uniquely modern: Can the past be taught, can it even be known, by people who have no respect for it?

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 65

We need to decide that we live, most of us in the West, long enough. We need to declare that, in the West, where few of us work ourselves to the bone, we have ease enough. In societies where most of us need storage lockers more than we need nanotech miracle boxes, we need to declare that we have enough stuff. Enough intelligence. Enough capability. Enough.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 109

After much occasion to consider the folly and mischiefs of a state of warfare, and the little or no advantage obtained even by those nations who have conducted it with the most success, I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 620

“Here’s what [Wilhelm Stekel] said: ‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.’”

–Mr. Antolini in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), p. 244

Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it.

–Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, p. 96

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.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 41