Some Quotes for July 2024 (#27)
C. S. Lewis, George Eliot, Stephen Jay Gould, Brandon Taylor, Clay Shirky, E. B. White, Yayoi Kusama, Scott Alexander, Eleanor Roosevelt
Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I was able to track down on the internet. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible. –C. S. Lewis
From Middlemarch: The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character. –George Eliot
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. –Stephen Jay Gould
From “What I’m Doing About Alice Munro”: Something happens to you when you experience something awful, the worst thing that can happen in fact, and no one around you does anything. When the fact of the awful thing happening to you goes unrecorded and unremarked. It is a kind of death and a kind of dream. You are in a play you are powerless to leave. Every day, you must see their face and you know must know that the people meant to protect you have chosen not to. And they don’t have some grand or profound reason for not protecting you. It’s just that they’ve chosen not to. When I was a child, I thought, oh, I guess I should die now, my life is worthless. But also, there was such fear. I remember the fear most of all. How it would seem to recede and I’d be playing in the woods by myself, throwing sticks into the air and trying kick them on the way down, and then all of a sudden, I’d feel this terrible twisting fear in my gut. The whole world would go quiet and I’d be standing there alone, so afraid, and not entirely sure where it had come from. – Taylor
“The Shirky Principle”: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. –Clay Shirky
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. –E. B. White
When the people see their own reflection multiplied to infinity they then sense that there is no limit to man's ability to project himself into endless space. –Yayoi Kusama
From “Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden”: I support the Principle of Charity. Nobody ever thinks in their own head “Haha, I am an evil person who is deceiving my friends and the world”. They think “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good”. But the flip side of that is that every horrible giant deception was perpetrated by people saying “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good”. And so if you are ever tempted to tell what seem like little white lies that don’t matter for the greater good, you should consider the possibility that actually, you’re being about as mendacious as anybody ever gets, and you have a decent chance of causing a disaster. And if you do cause a disaster, the fact that you didn’t go into it smirking “muahaha, now I shall be an evil person and cause a disaster” won’t be exculpatory. –Scott Alexander Siskind
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. –Eleanor Roosevelt