I’m a reader but not yet what I would call well-read. Reading regularly is something I starter doing many years ago (to cure my lack of education) and one of the first books I read was Age of Reason by Thomas Paine. The book was interesting to me because it helped me cleanse some of the cultish ideas in which I was raised. Even so, I never delved into his other works.
Recently, I looked at his pamphlet The America Crisis and my jaw dropped. Its opening was amazing:
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
These are beautifully poetic words for a work of political science. Wow! I have to read it thoroughly. I’m hooked. Where are these types of writers/thinkers today? Have we “advanced” beyond this beautiful wordsmithery?
“We were making the future,” [Graham] said, “and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!”
—H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes
You are never [fanatically] dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
In groups of people (committees) there tends to be an inclination, for the sake of consensus, to demand compromise from all the participants rather than evaluating (debating) whether certain points of view are wrong and should be changed and whether they are right and to remain unchanged. This is why Kierkegaard makes the claim “the crowd is untruth“; the introduction of a single untruth will corrupt the truth and, therefore, make the consensus untruth. Here’s Kierkegaard on the subject:
There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that ‘the crowd’ received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.
For ‘the crowd’ is untruth. Eternally, godly, christianly what Paul says is valid: “only one receives the prize,” [I Cor. 9:24]
— Søren Kierkegaard. The Crowd is Untruth
Here’s the whole scripture to which he referred:
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
— Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:24 (NIV1984)
Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls “the mad pride of intellectuality,” taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.
—Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
“There is nothing so self-defeating as a question not fully understood when it is fully posed.”
—C.S. Lewis
“…humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.”
Excerpt From: Gilbert Keith Chesterton. “The Napoleon of Notting Hill.”
