Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes
“A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.” BACK
Beauty and insight in a fragment of a forgotten sentence.
I’ve kept journals for decades, and recently while going through one nearly twenty years old, I came across this splinter from a forgotten sentence I’d jotted down, source unrecorded. There was only this penciled note: “I think from a newspaper article, or magazine article . . . an unexpected phrase of poetic beauty.” “. .…
How the “ruling class” frame their assets to the rest of us.
We’re all familiar now with Mark Zuckerberg’s unceasing and hypocritical paen to the sacred interactions of loyal Face Book users, and how their interactions on his platform will make their lives so much better. Well, I recently came across the following tweet, it’s origin long-lost to repetition, that gives the lie to Zuck’s magnanimity: “‘Community’…
APHORISM
aph·o·rism [ˈafəˌrizəm] NOUN a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples: “The child is father to the man.” (William Wadsworth) “Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.…
Straying afield from ourselves . . . what could we learn if we would?
Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun…
What Alexis de Tocqueville knew . . . .
“If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.” Apparently de Tocqueville was a more perceptive man in 1835, when America was still a new democracy, than many men are…
John Adams said. . .
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murder’s itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” But we must also remember: this was written in a letter from Adams to John Taylor, 17 December 1814. America had not yet established itself to the Western end of the continent,…
New theory of Dark Personality reveals the nine traits of evil people in your life
Having written a number of novels involving characters with “dark personalities”, I found this article recently published in BigThink.com worth sharing. The sad reality is that people with high D-factor scores do not live in isolation. The damage they do to the people who interact with them reverberates widely and deeply. They can cause a…