Essayists From England

"And I to have gained Honour; yet to have learned that Honour doth be but as the ash of Life, if that you not to have Love. And I to have Love. And to have Love is to have all; for that which doth be truly LOVE doth mother Honour and Faithfulness; and they three to build the House of Joy."

"The Night Land is one of the most extraordinary works in the English language. It is the story of the human race, trying to live long after it should have gone, long after everything should have gone, after the Sun has died, and the utter existential horror of that fact is the merest backdrop. It is a bestiary and an atlas of the bleakest dread imaginable. It is a piece of such stunning imaginative power, such awesome and terrible beauty, such majesty, that it defies its own faults and is a masterpiece."

"And lo! the creature did work slow in the brain."

"And, surely, this doth seem but a sane thinking unto me; but yet without proof, and to be said to you, only as the shapings of my thoughts."

"I saw many creatures that went about the fire, and did have warmth from the fire and drink from the spring; and surely I did ponder that the Peoples of this our Age should say, if they had stood with me, that Providence had made nigh together the warmth and the drink that were needful unto life (for it was grown to a bitter chill now in the Gorge). But rather did this thing seem to me otherwise, that these creatures did be but of their circumstance, and if that it had been another way, then had they grown of their wits to meet it to their means of life. Yet, as some would say, the arguments do but meet, and be the same thing."

"We are unable to give life, and therefore ought not wantonly to take it away from the meanest insect, without sufficient reason; they all receive it from the same benevolent hand as ourselves, and have therefore an equal right to enjoy it."

"Thousands are collected from the idle and the extravagant for seeing dogs, horses, men and monkeys perform feats of activity, and, in some places, for the privilege only of seeing one another."

"Omnipotence cannot work contradictions; it can only effect all possible things."

"Man is that link of the chain of universal existence, by which spiritual and corporeal Beings are united … How will man, that sanguinary tyrant, be able to excuse himself from the charge of those innumerable cruelties inflicted on his unoffending subjects committed to his care, formed for his benefit, and placed under his authority by their common Father?"

"If christian nations therefore were nations of christians, all war would be impossible and unknown among them."

"Those who profess outrageous zeal for the liberty and prosperity of their country, and at the same time infringe her laws, affront her religion and debauch her people, are but despicable quacks."

"Soames Jenyns and his more celebrated reviewer, Dr. Johnson, as explicitly as Bentham, laid down the doctrine that utility is the foundation of morals."

"Great men whilst living must expect disgraces, Dead they're ador'd—when none desire their places."

"The chief business of a government is like that of a nurse, to hinder those who are under its care from doing mischief to themselves."

"A very useful book might be written with the sole object of advising what parts of what books should be read. It should not be a book of elegant extracts, but should merely refer to the passages which are advised to be read. It might also indicate what are the chief works upon any given subject. For example, take rent; the important passages in Adam Smith, Ricardo, Jones, Mill, and other writers, should be referred to."

"There is nothing so easily made offensive as good reasoning; and men of clear logical minds, if not gifted at the same time with tact, make more enemies than men with bad hearts and unsound understandings."

"Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion."

"Soothe the present as much as we may; look forward as hopefully as we can to the future, still the dreadful past must overshadow us."

"The envious man desires some good which another possesses; the jealous man would often be content to be without the good so that that other did not possess it."

"Friendship is often outgrown; and his former child’s clothes will no more fit a man than some of his former friendships."

"The more truth you can get into any business, the better. Let the other side know the defects of yours, let them know how you are to be satisfied, let there be as little to be found as possible (I should say nothing), and if your business be an honest one, it will be best tended in this way."

"Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought."

"Even the most careless people have a sort of aversion to signing things which they have never considered."

"How often we should stop in the pursuit of folly, if it were not for the difficulties that continually beckon us onwards."

"You must work for yourself; for what you reject may be as important for you to have seen and thought about, as what you adopt."

"Ah, what a blessing this smoking is! perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America."

"Do not mistake energy for enthusiasm; the softest speakers are often the most enthusiastic of men."

"Any one who is much talked of, must be much maligned. This seems to be a harsh conclusion; but when you consider how much more given men are to depreciate than to appreciate, you will acknowledge that there is some truth in the saying."

"Our knowledge of human nature is for the most part empirical; and it would often be better, if, instead of endeavouring to say some new things ourselves, we were to confirm without more words the sayings of another."

"The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. The rich are always advising the poor; but the poor seldom return the compliment."

"Tact is the result of refined sympathy."

"The most enthusiastic man in a cause is rarely chosen as the leader."

"There is one statesman of the present day, of whom I always say that he would have escaped making the blunders that he has made if he had only ridden more in omnibuses."

"Self-indulgence takes many forms; and we should bear in mind that there may be a sullen sensuality as well as a gay one."

"The unfortunate Ladurlad did not desire the sleep that for ever fled his weary eyelids with more earnestness than most people seek the deep slumber of a decided opinion."

"It has always appeared to me that there is so much to be done in this world, that all self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for others, is a loss—a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual world."

"Love, like the opening of the heavens to the Saints, shows for a moment, even to the dullest man, the possibilities of the human race. He has faith, hope, and charity for another being, perhaps but a creation of his imagination: still it is a great advance for a man to be profoundly loving even in his imagination."

"No man ever praised two persons equally—and pleased them both."

"There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius."

"The knowledge of others which experience gives us, is of slight value when compared with that which we obtain from having proved the inconstancy of our own desires."

". . . if scientists could get rid of the mental block which prevents them investigating a vast subject right under their noses, they could soon learn a great deal more than my wife and I are capable of doing."

"On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist."

"Even when he is wrong, however, Judt writes with fearless integrity and moral seriousness. Like Raymond Aron, the subtle and relentless French polemicist whose spirit breathes through these pages, Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions."

"His style is temperate rather than polemical, allusive rather than dogmatic. He is not easy to pin down. I suspect that, like Michael Oakeshott, he does not believe in conclusions, preferring conversation to meander according to the quality of those taking part. The reader is left with impressions and suggestions, jostling each other for attention. He avoids the catcalls and blazing generalities that pass for debate in today’s cyber world."

"Postwar tells the story of how that happened. The book is ambitiously organized to combine the whole of the postwar history of Europe—Western and Eastern—into a single conceptual framework. The result is not a work of dispassionate scholarship. In the preface, Judt describes his approach as an "avowedly personal interpretation" of the recent European past. "In a word that has acquired undeservedly pejorative connotations," he writes, Postwar is "opinionated." Judt's thesis, developed through 900 pages, is this: Europe remade itself by forgetting its past. "The first postwar Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life." And there was much to forget: collaboration, genocide, extreme deprivation."

"It is unclear why Tony Judt hates Clinton so much--Bill Clinton was, I think, (except for that big problem with the zipper) the best president America has had since Truman (or maybe Eisenhower), and the most liberal president America has had since LBJ. But hate Bill Clinton Tony Judt does. And that, I think, is the source of the energy behind his massive misreading of Reich."

"To my knowledge, but I don't know everything and it is not too late, Professor Judt has not yet acknowledged publicly that he did not tell the truth. You will have noticed that, in speaking of the contre-vérité of his article, I never said that Professor Judt had lied. Everything that is false cannot be imputed to a lie. The lie is not an error. Already Plato and Augustine insisted on this in unison. If the concept of lie has some resistant specificity, it must be rigorously distinguished from error, from ignorance, from prejudice, from faulty reasoning, and even from failure in the realm of knowledge or still again-and this is where things will soon have to get more complicated for us-from failure in the realm of action, practice, or technique. If the lie is neither the failure of knowledge and knowhow, nor error, if it implies ill will or bad faith in the order of moral reason, not of practice but of pure practical reason, if it addresses belief rather than knowledge, then the project of a history of the lie should not resemble in the least what could be called, following Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols, the history of an error [Geschichte eines Irrtums]."

"One of these pasts is the lost role of the public intellectual: well-informed but willing to range beyond the ghetto of expertise—who doesn’t just observe but also tries to intervene or provoke. The economic background to Ill Fares the Land might be incomplete but the reappraising anger is just. Tony’s willingness to take on this topic—to use his fast-depleting energies on this particular stage at this particular time—is yet another dramatic intervention, combining a personal voice with a knowledge of history and sense of occasion in a way that is both responsive and responsible, timely and moral."

"In contrast to the United States, which continued to treat ‘Islam’ and Muslims as a distant challenge, alien and hostile, best addressed by heightened security and ‘pre-emptive war’, Europe’s governments had good reason to see the matter very differently. In France especially, the crisis in the Middle East was no longer a matter of foreign policy: it had become a domestic problem. The transmigration of passions and frustrations from persecuted Arabs in Palestine to their angry, dispirited brethren in Paris should not have come as a surprise—it was, after all, another legacy of empire."

"That history should have weighed so heavily upon European affairs at the start of the twenty-first century was ironic, considering how lightly it lay upon the shoulders of contemporary Europeans. The problem was not so much education—the teaching or mis-teaching of history in schools, though in some parts of southeastern Europe this too was a source of concern—as the public uses to which the past was now put. In authoritarian societies, of course, this was an old story; but Europe, by its self-definition, was post-authoritarian. Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not readily be altered for political convenience."