Quotations

"Do not fall victim to excessive idealism and believe that telling the truth will bring you closer to people. People love and reward those who can soothe them with illusions. Since ancient times, humanity has only punished those who speak the truth. If you want to stay among people, share their illusions. The truth is spoken only by those who are ready to depart." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Some budding adolescents resist the normal physical developments that accompany another critical stage of development. Anorexia nervosa in adolescent girls, for instance, often is rooted in the wish to remain presexual, to cling to childhood. The same dynamic holds in midlife. Resistance to transformation is strong. If one extends the reasonable wish to be youthful too long and continues to get pumped up with juvenile hormones beyond the appropriate time, however, one will become nothing more than a slowly aging caterpillar, struggling ever harder to put off the final day of reckoning. The mature personality and the deeper, archetypally based identity will not form. After a certain point in life, the puer aeternus (eternal adolescent) and his sister, the puella aeterna, cut rather sorry figures, precisely because they lack this quality. It is a quality of depth and integrity, rooted in layers of the psyche beyond the superficial levels of social adjustment (persona formation) based upon a need to please, to join in, and to get along. Cosmetic surgery may prop up the illusion of never aging, while the real benefit of aging-transformation into one's full identity as an adult person-is lost in the cuttings on the floor. The shift in body image and chemistry is part of the whole life plan, not an increasing deficiency to be remedied artificially so as to feel young a while longer." Murray Stein, a Jungian psychologist

"Then the poor, deprived of their land, were no longer eager for military service and had few children, so that soon all Italy was bereft of freemen and filled with gangs of foreign slaves, through whom the rich cultivated their estates, having driven away the free citizens."
Plutarch, The Life of Tiberius Gracchus

I watched Candace Owens today for the first time in months. Someone said her Telegram channel is wonderful so I had a look. She is quite brilliant on Mayor-elect of New York Mamdani here. She says he won because he was the only candidate who did not promise that his first foreign visit would be to Israel. He said he would not go abroad but stay and work for the city, including for New York's Jews.

“The genocide could not have proceeded and would not proceed today if Muslims were not complicit.” Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl referring to the Arab kings and Egypt.

"Many people see, as I do, a direct connection in the genocide accusations to a centuries’ old calumny that has bedeviled the Jewish people, used since the Middle Ages to taunt them and even to justify massacring and exiling them. It’s called the blood libel, and it has long helped fuel the apparently undying fires of antisemitism." Frida Ghitis on CNN.com, May 7, 2024

"The history of innovation since the 19th century holds two important lessons. The first is that the economic benefits of innovation are massive and can last for more than 100 years. The great European inventions of the 19th and early-20th centuries were not the result of luck, but of attitude and aptitude. The second lesson — the one that Germany is learning the hard way now — is that things end unless you keep innovating." Wolfgang Munchau in Unherd. Europe is in striking relative decline, despite or because of the EEC/EC/EU.