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And when they write, they write about politics to discourage us from practicing politics, and write about rhetoric to discourage us from practicing rhetoric, and about kingship to discourage us from consorting with kings.

- Plutarch, Against Colotes

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I never desired to please the many, for I did not learn the things which please them, and what I did learn was far removed from their perception.

- Gnomologium Parisinum

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I write this for you, not for the many; for we are for each other a sufficiently large audience.

- Seneca, Letters on Ethics

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Talking of London, he observed, "Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists." -- I have often amused myself with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium. A politician thinks of it merely as the seat of government in its different departments; a grazier, as a vast market for cattle; a mercantile man, as a place where a prodigious deal of business is done upon 'Change; a dramatick enthusiast, as the grand scene of theatrical entertainments; a man of pleasure, as an assemblage of taverns, and the great emporium for ladies of easy virtue. But the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.

- Boswell, Life of Johnson

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Evolution is a process
Too slow to save my soul.

- Darby Crash

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I don't know how humanity stands it
    with a painted paradise at the end of it
    without a painted paradise at the end of it

- Pound, Cantos, LXXIV

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The citizens of a certain town had once an officer in their service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose up and said, "Let us kill him and then worship him as our patron saint." And so they did, following the example set by the Roman Senate with Romulus.

- Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

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To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us unavoidably.

- Milton, Areopagitica

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In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that very reason, a freethinker or philosophe today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the League. One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one's own age.

- Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

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Philosophers are asked to provide a moral system containing principles and conclusions, with watertight logic and reliable applicability to every dilemma. In general they have fulfilled this expectation. Even if they did not establish a practical system and a well-developed casuistics, they derived the need for obedience to authority from their theoretical considerations. Generally, they provided logical reasons and evidence in support of the whole scale of values already approved by public practice. "Honor the gods through your traditional native religion," wrote Epicurus, and Hegel echoed these words. Anyone who is slow in confessing his faith is asked even more energetically to put forward his belief in a general principle. If thought is to do more than merely confirm dominant regulations, it must appear more universal and authoritative than when it simply justifies something which already holds. You consider the existing power to be unjust--Do you want power to be replaced by chaos? You criticize the monotonous uniformity of life and progress?--Shall we then light wax candles in the evening and allow our cities to be full of stinking refuse as they were in the Middle Ages? ... What seems intolerable is the attempt to break away from the "Either-Or," to overcome mistrust for the abstract principle and infallibility without doctrine.

- Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Notes and Drafts"

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The continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense, unsystematic though their classification and mysterious though their explanation is too often allowed to remain, has done on the whole nothing but good.

- J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words

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Que le coeur de l'homme est creux et plein d'ordure!

- Pascal, Pensées

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(This place meant a lot to me. But now I got my own blog: http://slawkenbergius.blogspot.com.)