For a leftist, one can never be too far left, and anyone the least bit conservative is a 'fascist.'
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
Generalizations are the Offspring of Wisdom
People foolishly oppose generalization. One often hears, 'Never generalize!' But of course that itself is a generalization in the imperative mood. The partisan of brute particularity who so opines is hoist by his own petard.
So it was with pleasure that I heard Dennis Prager one day remark that "Generalizations are the mother of wisdom." But being a quibbler and a pedant, I cannot forebear to suggest an improvement:
Generalizations are the offspring of wisdom
or
Generalization is wisdom's distillate.
For wisdom does not spring from generalization; it is rather that generalizations spring from wisdom as its expression and codification.
No Comity Without Commonality
Would that the fetishizers of diversity and inclusion understood that social harmony presupposes commonality. But theirs is a bogus diversity and inclusiveness in any case, excluding as it does those who disagree with them.
Obscurity and Celebrity
Too shadowy to be worth protecting by Travenesque ruses designed to keep it enshrouded in obscurity, the self is too substantial to be conferrable by fame.
Truth and Institutions
The truth is too magnificent a thing to be the the property of any one institution. Too magnificent a thing, and too elusive a thing to be owned or housed or patented or reduced to the formulas of a sect or finitized or fought over.
Spiritual Visibility
In the course of life one meets thousands. But one is visible to only one or two.
The Pointlessness of Worry
The dreaded event will either occur or it will not. If it occurs, then the worrier suffers twice, once from the event, and once from the worry. If it does not occur, then the person suffers from neither. Therefore, worry is irrational. Make provision for the future, be aware of the possibilities of mishap, take reasonable precautions — but don't worry.
The Modal Asymmetry of Birth and Death
Our births were contingent, our deaths will be necessary.
(The literary value of this aphorism, if you care to assign it any, trades on an equivocation, which I leave to the reader to detect.)
‘Superb’
'Superb' is still able to convey a hint of the Latin, superbia, pride. A thoughtful writer bears this in mind. But in a world of thoughtless readers, there is not much call for thoughtful writers.
This reflection occasioned by a sentence from a secondary source on Pascal: "[The extrinsic proofs of Christianity] are humiliating to the superb power of reasoning that would like to judge of everything."
Bucket List
Give some thought to the question whether the entries on it just might precipitate an early kicking of it.
On Exercise in Nature
There is the beauty, the silence, the peace, the nonsocial reality of nature, but there is also the shift away from the mind back to the sweating, toiling body on earth. Exercise in an artificial environment is not the same, nor is 'windshield tourism.' You should take your Nature straight, in a direct encounter, boots to the trail, not mediated through glass.
History
History is as much a projection of politics into the past as it is a knowledge of the past.
George Carlin
The poor guy died in adolescence.
Life’s Sandwich
All of life's uncertainties are sandwiched between two certainties. We were born and we shall die.
Death Bed Reading
What will you have on your death stand? Whose thoughts will occupy your mind in your final moments in the dying of the light, as the breath comes short and the cancer cells conquer organ after organ? Speaking for myself, I'll take Plato over Putnam, Boethius over Butchvarov, Aquinas over Quine, the Psalms over Sartre. Reading Quine at a moment like that would like looking for bread among the dusty and jagged shards in a stone quarry.
It is not too soon to begin making a list.