Quotations

"Unfortunately science is only splendid when it is science. When science becomes religion it becomes superstition." G. K. Chesterton

“I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.” Michel Houellebecq

"Of what is significant in one’s own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?" Albert Einstein


“She was his kind of loser, and he loved her.” John le Carré

"Idealism had ended up with a bullet in the stomach at the foot of the stairs; the idealist had been caught out in treachery and murder. Rowe didn't believe they had had to blackmail him much. They had only to appeal to his virtues, his intellectual pride, his abstract love of humanity. One can't love humanity. One can only love people." Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

"Universities aren’t engines of social mobility; they’re left-wing madrassas." Toby Young

"University is not to educate but to inculcate mental conformity and destroy intellectual diversity. Obedience and silo thinking are its way. This stops people fully growing up creating a strange limbo between late adolescence and adulthood which often lasts a lifetime." CCawley@HardLineDemocat

“Why,” I said, “the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise.” “Yes, these things do happen,” he said. “They do,” said I, “and such other trifles as these. The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young, are full of pleasantry and graciousness, imitating the young for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.” Plato, warning against democracy, in the Republic Book 8, 562a-3b