It rarely paid to frighten people but it never paid to confuse them.

Lifted & spun a bit from Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

Most worldly affairs are performed by themselves.

Montaigne

Content yourself ... to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.

Montaigne

I do not disapprove the use we make of things the earth produces, nor doubt, in the least, of the power and fertility of Nature, and of its application to our necessities: I very well see that pikes and swallows live by her laws; but I mistrust the inventions of our mind, our knowledge and art, to countenance which, we have abandoned Nature and her rules, and wherein we keep no bounds nor moderation. 

Montaigne

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.

Jia Tolentino, as quoted in the New York Review by Jonathan Lethem

Narrative is a lie... it sustains its power from a quite illogical juxtaposition of events, and perceived chain of causality- it is simply seditious, and cannot be trusted!

Chris Deliso, in the yet unpublished Third Emperor of California

Lying is a base vice....  Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public society....  it breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government. 

Montaigne

The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.


Christophe Guilluy, quoted by James McAuley in the New York Review (March 21, 2019)

Ecology and evolution are deeply intertwined. Just as the death and decay of organisms provide raw materials for subsequent generations, so too the deaths of species spawn new possibilities for future generations of species. Without extinction, there would be insufficient ecological space for evolution to explore alternative solutions and diversify into new life forms. When initially faced with some change to their native environments, species don’t grimly stay put and evolve into new forms better suited to the transformed conditions. They move, tracking the old habitat. In general, it’s only when the old habitat disappears that species are forced to adapt or die. Mass extinctions—the dying off of multiple, distantly-related lineages over vast areas in a short span of time—occur when one or more external forces wipe out a range of habitats, cutting off opportunities for tracking habitats.  Over the past half-billion  years, there have been five major mass extinctions, with the dinosaurs wiped out in the most recent of these. We now face the sixth mass extinction, which threatens to tear apart the fabric of the biosphere, with drastic consequences for most life on this planet, including us. In better times, species losses tick along at a barely discernable rate—perhaps one every five years. At present, somewhere between 50 and 150 species disappear every day, never to be seen again.... This time around, a single species—Homo sapiens—has become the external force driving the decimation of millions of other species. Yes, we are the asteroid now colliding with the planet. 


Scott D. Sampson, Dismiss dinosaurs as failures...and pave a path to a bleak future

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell.

Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

It was impossible for any one to open his grief to a neighbor and to concert measures to defend himself, as he would have had to speak either to one whom he did not know, or whom he knew but did not trust.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

Today’s news is always old news. The innocent get slaughtered and someone makes up excuses.

Charles Simic, Portable Hell (NYR)

Mistakes are good.  The more mistakes, the better.  People who make mistakes get promoted.  They can be trusted.  Why?  They're not dangerous.  They can't be too serious.  People who don't make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability.  They might land on you.

James Church, A Corpse in the Koryo

Chaos has killed me....But the victory of unpredictability is hallow. Men imagine, in their pride, that they can predict life's each event, and govern nature and govern each other with rules of unyielding iron. Not so. There will always be men...who will do the things no one else predicts or can control....For men to be civilized, they must be unlike each other, so that when chaos comes to claim them, no two will use what strategy the other does, and thus, even in the middle of blind chaos, some men, by sheer blind chance, if nothing else, will conquer. The way to conquer the chaos which underlies all the illusionary stable things in life, is to be so free, and tolerant, and so much in love with liberty, that chaos itself becomes our ally; we shall become what no one can foresee; and courage and inventiveness will be the names we call our fearless unpredictability.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence