John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

It is not the person we love, but the very act of loving, that redeems us.

Liberalism and conservatism are often presented as two opposite ways of thinking, but it would be more honest to call them two different ways of not thinking. One is liberal to the extent that one refuses to consider the harm our attempts to improve the world may cause; one is conservative insofar as one refuses to acknowledge that the world could be improved by some changes.

When two people disagree about the objectivity of a standard, you can be certain that at least of them is wrong.

One commits a grievous crime against science every time that one presumes, without a rigorous, logical proof, that something is unknowable simply because it is currently unknown.

But how common this crime is today in certain quarters!

I am not a libertarian because I ultimately see liberty as a means rather than an end.

Often our ideas sound good to us simply because we have never heard them come out of anyone else’s mouth. We then find that a singe echo can suffice to disillusion us.

This Democrat drives a Mercedes while railing against income inequality; that Republican demands abstinence, but unconditionally supports her unwed, pregnant, teenage daughter.

Political correctness is necessarily a crime against free speech, because what is offensive to one man is often thought-provoking to another.

Freedom is born from limitations: For a finite mind, having an infinite number of possible choices is as paralyzing as having none. It is only when a very few possibilities occur to us that we can rank their values and choose a best path.

Should we be more humbled by how much we have yet to learn or how much we have already forgotten?