Anyway, I'm not summarizing Stendahl's ideas about love and crystallization that carefully, because I mostly present them to abuse them for my own purposes.

—BDM, "My Crank Theory of Cultural Longevity"

 LaBoeuf was rubbing down his shaggy pony. He said, "You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don't know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water."

Rooster said, "If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar."

"Then you don't believe it?" asked LaBoeuf.

"I believed it the first twenty-five times I heard it."

—Charles Portis, True Grit

"Can you give us some idea of what all that means, Mr. Popper?"

"It doesn't mean much of anything in a surface reading like that."

"That's what I would have said too. So much sawdust. I'm surprised to hear you admit it."

"I acknowledge it freely enough. A lot of that is just filler material in the oracular mode to put P.S. off the scent."

"P.S.?"

"Perfect Strangers. Those who are not Gnomons. Others, outsiders. P.S. or A.M. Perfect Strangers or the Ape Men."

"But to what purpose? Apes we may be, but why throw dust in our eyes? Can you explain?"

"Sure can. I thought it would be obvious. We do it to protect our secret knowledge. We don't know whose hands those books might fall into, Senator, and so we are obliged to put a lot of matter in there to weary and disgust the reader. The casual reader is put off at once. A page or two of that and the ordinary man is a limp rag. Even great scholars, men who are trained and well paid to read dull books, are soon beaten down by it."

—Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

He began to talk about his youth, about his days as a medical student at Wooten Institute in New Orleans. I couldn't follow all that stuff and I tuned him out as best I could. He ended the long account by saying that Dr. Wooten "invented clamps."

"Medical clamps?" I idly inquired.

"No, just clamps. He invented the clamp."

"I don't understand that. What kind of clamp are you talking about?"

"Clamps! Clamps! That you hold two things together with! Can't you understand plain English?"

"Are you saying this man made the first clamp?"

"He got a patent on it. He invented the clamp."

"No, he didn't."

"Then who did?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know. And you don't know Smitty Wooten either, but you want to tell me he didn't invent the clamp."

"He may have invented some special kind of clamp but he didn't invent the clamp. The principle of the clamp was probably known to the Sumerians. You can't go around saying this fellow from Louisiana invented the clamp."

"He was the finest diagnostician of our time. I suppose you deny that too."

"That's something else."

"No, go ahead. Attack him all you please. He's dead now and can't defend himself. Call him a liar and a bum. It's great sport for people who sit on the sidelines of life."

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

I have often noticed in the United States that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off. I contradict an American at every word he says, to show him that his conversation bores me; he instantly labors with fresh pertinacity to convince me; I preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks I am meditating deeply on the truths that he is uttering; at last I rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. The man will never understand that he wearies me to death unless I tell him so, and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life.

 —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

To a stranger all the domestic controversies of the American at first appear to be incomprehensible or puerile, and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Satire, of course, is more than simple mocking. Mockers can be nihilists; if nothing is valuable, nothing is true, then everything becomes a target for mockery. Satirists are more than mockers and are definitely not nihilists. Satirists poke fun by comparing the "is" to the "ought," the "actual" to the "ideal." The whole point of the satirist's work is to prod the "is" closer to the "ought"; satirists are idealists.

—Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna

No one would accuse criticism at present of lacking flexibility. It has grown so flexible in fact as to become invertebrate.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The postmodern understanding of truth-as-power leads to a postmodern political praxis, in which language is intentionally manipulated to institute these new modes of reality. This is why there is so much emphasis on policing speech—creating new pronouns and mandating their use, constantly changing the definitions of terms like gender, continually proliferating new categories of and subcategories of identity and desire. This is a concerted effort to enforce a new truth-script through an exercise of power.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

Suppose a secularist in derision sneers, "I have actually found some honest Christians." He expects you to infer that he has found many that are not. In fact, he hopes you will infer that an honest Christian is very rare. Now, it may be that honest Christians are very rare, but under the circumstances you are justified to reply, "Your propaganda ought to find less obvious fallacies."

—Gordon Clark, Logic

Pickering structured his life in Washington as though determined to diminish the possibility that any of his misperceptions might be challenged. He seldom attended social gatherings where Jeffersonians might be present and exchanged views with members of the opposition only on the floor of the Senate. Living at Coyle's was in itself a defense against foreign ideas. There, the little group of embattled Federalists spent evenings by the hearthside reinforcing one another's prejudices.

—Gerald H. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic

 The Internet, which gives us access to a diversity of viewpoints with unimaginable ease, in fact speeds our retreat into a confirmatory bubble.

---Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

...Who in the sections had voted for liberticidal projects. Such was the expression of the day; for in France, at every revolution a new phrase is framed which serves all the world, that everyone may have sense or sentiment ready made to his hand.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

All inferior men are ready to call the bayonet to their assistance against the arguments of reason, that they may act by means just as mechanical as their own understanding; but superior minds desire nothing but the free exercise of thought, and are aware how much a state of war is unfavorable to it.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

At a time when France had both famine and bankruptcy to dread, the deputies used to make speeches in which they asserted that "every man has from nature a right and a wish to enjoy happiness; that society began by the father and the son," with other philosophic truths much fitter for discussion in books than in the midst of an assembly. but if the people stood in need of bread, the speakers stood in need of applause, and a scarcity in that respect would have seemed to them very hard to bear.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

There is much to be said, socially and intellectually, for bringing together people of different outlooks and beliefs; but there is no rational basis for the notion that by mixing a number of conflicting views you are likely to arrive at the truth. You cannot construct truth from a mass of dissonant and disparate material. You cannot construct truth at all: you can only discover it.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

Joining, as a reader or conversationalist, in the discussion of the issues which Green has raised, one has to become temporarily—mentally—a non-Christian. Otherwise one carries on a private monologue. This is because, on entering the field of discourse inhabited by Green and his like, one finds one is the only Christian present.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

Seeing is a function of the eyes; yet we also use this word for the other senses as well, when we exercise them in the search for knowledge. We do not say, "Listen how it glows," "Smell how it glistens," "Taste how it shines," or "Feel how it flashes," since all of these are said to be seen. And we do not simply say "See how it shines," which only the eyes can perceive; but we also say, "See how it sounds, see how it smells, see how it tastes, see how hard it is."

—Augustine, Confessions

Philosophers speak as they have a mind to, and in the most difficult matters do not scruple to offend religious ears; but we are bound to speak according to a certain rule, lest freedom of speech beget impiety of opinion about the matters themselves of which we speak.

—Augustine, The City of God

He wrote a book against the system of forcing men to testify against themselves and claimed the Magna Carta itself forbade the practice. It did not, but the claim was instantly accepted, picked up, recirculated, and widely used. Like Buchanan's claim that the early kings of Scotland were elected, the historical claim fitted magnificently into the propagation of a new element in an evolving revolutionary doctrine.

---Otto Scott, James I: The Fool as King