Saturday, January 2, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 2 January 2021


The greatest generals of our political history—Washington, Grant, Lee, Eisenhower—have been notably unwarlike men. (MacArthur, thank God, existed outside our political world, outside any world but that bounded by Autobiography.) These supreme commanders have been less bellicose than our Little Colonel, our artillery gunner, our PT boat commander [JKK], or—now—our naval supply officer [Nixon].

All fear comes from picturing the future. Putting things off increases that fear.

You will never 'find' time for anything, if you want time you must make it. --- Charles Buxton

Terror, the obedient servant of Nature or History and the omnipresent executor of their predestined movement, fabricates the oneness of all men by abolishing the boundaries of law which provide the living space for the freedom of each individual.

If there is to be anything at all which can in any sense be called natural science, the people in whose minds it is to exist must take it absolutely for granted that there is such a thing as ‘nature’, the opposite (contradictory) of ‘art’: that there are things that happen quite irrespectively of anything these people themselves do, however intelligently or fortunately, and irrespectively also of anything any one else may do even with skill and luck greater than their own. They must take it absolutely for granted that somewhere in the world there is a dividing line between things that happen or can be made to happen or can be prevented by art (and art never succeeds without a certain support from luck), and things that happen of themselves, or by nature.

[One] sense of the word may be defined as follows. A cause is an event or state of things which it is in our power to produce or prevent, and by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be.