Here are some quotes I like!



If the most intelligent people we know—the "best-educated," to use a current term—were also the people who make most extensive use of logico-experimental [scientific] principles in social matters to the exclusion of all other principles, it would be legitimate to conclude that, in course of time, such people would reject everything of a non- experimental character; and that other people, more or less their equals in knowledge, would also be more or less like them in their exclusive acceptance of logico-experimental principles. But the facts do not stand that way. If theologians have diminished in number among our educated people and lost much of their power, metaphysicists, properly so called, are still prospering and enjoying fame and influence, to say nothing of those metaphysicists who call themselves "positivists" or under some other name are merrily overstepping the boundaries of the logico-experimental. Many scientists who are supremely great in the natural sciences, where they use logico-experimental principles exclusively or almost so, forget them entirely when they venture into the social sciences. As regards the masses in the large, what one observes is an unending alternation of theologies and systems of metaphysics rather than any reduction in the total number of them.

--Vilfredo Pareto. The Mind and Society.

Velasquez was more than dignified—he was pompous, and something of a martinet in his ideas of discipline, being so tenacious of etiquette that no one, not even the first citizens in the colony, sat uninvited in his presence. Nor had he ever stood in relations of equal comradeship to Cortes, however friendly he may have been; hence it is not to be imagined that he humbled himself to offer a reconciliation, being first rebuffed by his subordinate, and afterwards, when it suited the latter to present himself before him, that he celebrated the resumption of friendly relations with such demonstrations of affection and intimacy as Gomara describes.Yet Diego Velasquez's vast capacity for blundering enabled him even to do this. His desire to explore and conquer by deputy, and to win distinction vicariously, was defeated by the impossibility of finding men possessed of the required ability to undertake successfully such ventures, combined with sufficient docility to surrender to him the glory and profits resulting from them.

--Frances Augustus Macnutt. Preface to Letters of Cortes

... So what do ascetic ideals mean? In the case of an artist, we have concluded: nothing at all! ... Or so many things that it is tantamount to nothing! ... Let us put aside artists for the time being: their position in the world and against the world is far from sufficiently independent for their changing valuations as such to merit our attention! Down the ages, they have been the valets of a morality or philosophy or religion: quite apart from the fact that they were, unfortunately, often the all-too-glib courtiers of their hangers-on and patrons and sycophants with a nose for old or indeed up-and-coming forces. At the very least, they always need a defender, a support, an already established authority: artists never stand independently, being alone is against their deepest instincts. So, for example, Richard Wagner took the philosopher Schopenhauer as his front man, his defender, ‘when the time came’...

--Friedrich Nietzsche. On The Genealogy of Morality