the micro-blog version of “Taking Thoughts Captive” with brief quotes, fleeting thoughts, and other ephemera from the cutting room floor...
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Nowadays, the moronic youth to whom movies are marketed prefer the visible to exceed reality—ergo the endless car-chases, explosions, and sci-fi fantasies. An intelligent film is as rare as a non-swearing teenager; being able to quote Breaking Bad’s best bits is the new measure of cultural refinement. With few exceptions, the quality of screen-writing, acting, and directing is now abysmal.”
— Taki Theodoracopulos, from “Hollywood's War on America”
“We can’t crucify beauty without steadily walking into hell. Every time we walk the dog we are surrounded by hints of the Kingdom of Heaven. That’s a big thought to swim into. One of the ways we can practice being saintly is to notice that sort of grace. The more we abide in it, the more folks around us start to notice. This is one of the attributes that used to define saints; you glimpse more of the Kingdom of Heaven around them. They are literally an eye-opener.”
— Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as to not offend the imbeciles.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
“No one ever became excellent in any exercise whatsoever without beginning from his childhood to endure heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and other discomforts; wherefore those men are entirely deceived who think to be able, at their ease and with all the comforts of the world, to attain to honorable rank. It is not by sleeping but by waking and studying continually that progress is made.”
— Giorgio Vasari, on Luca Della Robbia in Lives of the Artists
“There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
“The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.”
-– Theodore Roosevelt
“’Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded. And once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.”
— Friedrich Hayek
“Sir, there are two passions which have a powerful influence on the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power, and the love of money. Separately each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects. place before the eyes of such men a post of honor that shall at the same time be a place of profit, and they will move heaven and earth to obtain it. ”
— Benjamin Franklin, June 2nd, 1787