JayD > JayD's Quotes

“Three kinds of mass organization predominate in contemporary Western society: the mass corporation in the economy, the mass state in government, and the mass organizations of culture and communication. The latter include not only the media of mass communication, one of the most important instruments by which the managerial elite disciplines and controls the mass population, but also all other mass organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas, and values advertising, publishing, journalism, film and broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development.”
― Samuel T. Francis

“Whether ye rise for the sake of a creed,
Or riot in hope of spoil,
Equally will I punish the deed,
Equally check the broil;
No wise permitting injustice at all
From whatever doctrine it springs—
But—whether ye follow Priapus or Paul,
I care for none of these things.”

Gallio’s Song”
― Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's Verse Definitive Edition

“Generation after generation the honest and independent, not marrying till they had the means, and striving to bring up their families without assistance, have been saddled with extra burdens, and hindered from leaving a desirable posterity; while the dissolute and the idle, especially when given to that lying and servility by which those in authority are deluded, have been helped to produce and to rear progeny, characterized, like themselves, by the absence of mental traits needed for good citizenship.”
― Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology

“.. if the thing denied is the possibility of reducing Sociology to the form of an exact science; then the rejoinder is that the thing denied is a thing which no one has affirmed. . . But so far as there can be generalization, and so far as there can be interpretation based on it, so far there can be science.”
― Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology

“Don't believe for a minute that this all belongs to some distant past. These are not antediluvian monsters, creatures who pitifully faded away in the 1950s along with the poverty depicted by Rossellini, or were carted off with the ruins of Berlin. These names still exist. Their fortunes are enormous.”
― Éric Vuillard, L'Ordre du jour

“In the grand scheme of business, partisan struggles didn't amount to much. Politicians and industrialists routinely dealt with each other.”
― Éric Vuillard, L'Ordre du jour

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

“An ideology is not a scientific theory, but often nonscientific and even antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events--though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories. Thus the theory of evolution or of relativity or of the electronic composition of matter are scientific theories; whereas the doctrines of the preambles to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, the Nazi racial doctrines, Marxist dialectical materialism, St. Anselm's doctrine of the meaning of world history, are ideologies.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“. . . modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. . . They are in a particular panic over things they can't even see--germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. . . Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusion--a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages.”
― Michael Crichton

“And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”
― Fydor Dostoyevsky