Mind Modifies Body

Mind modifies body involuntarily.

-- William Godwin (1756 - 1836), English journalist and political philosopher, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 7

They Know We Know

They lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

-- Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova (2010), Chapter 13: A Tour of Leningrad, pp 172 and 173

Some Awareness

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

-- Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983), American writer on social and political philosophy, The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955) Section 151

The Height Of A Mountain

Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top.  Then you will see how low it was.

-- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 - 1961), Swedish diplomat, second United Nations Secretary-General, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Markings (1964)

The Things To Do

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.  Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it.  This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983), American philosopher, systems theorist, architect, and inventor, Letter to "Micheal" (16 February 1970), Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker"

Human Material

Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material.  It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.

-- Czesław Miłosz (1911 - 2004), Polish poet and essayist, 1980 Nobel laureate in Literature, The Captive Mind (1953) translated by Jane Zielonko (1990) 

To Be Responsible

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.  It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery.  It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades.  It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900 - 1944), French writer, poet and aviator, Terre des Hommes (1939) Ch. II : The Men

Check That Lawlessness

This case arises out of the President's unilateral efforts to eliminate a Cabinet-level agency established by Congress nearly half a century ago: the Department of Education.  As Congress mandated, the Department plays a vital role in this Nation's education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year.   

Only Congress has the power to abolish the Department.  The Executive's task, by contrast, is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." U. S. Const., Art. II, §3.  Yet, by executive fiat, the President ordered the Secretary of Education to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department." Exec. Order No. 14242, 90 Fed. Reg. 13679 (2025). Consistent with that Executive Order, Secretary Linda McMahon gutted the Department's work force, firing over 50 percent of its staff overnight.  In her own words, that mass termination served as "the first step on the road to a total shutdown" of the Department. 

When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary's duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.  Two lower courts rose to the occasion, preliminarily enjoining the mass firings while the litigation remains ongoing.  Rather than maintain the status quo, however, this Court now intervenes, lifting the injunction and permitting the Government to proceed with dismantling the Department.  That decision is indefensible.  It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.  The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.  Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent.

-- Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, with whom Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join, dissenting in Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education, v New York, on application for stay, in which the majority allowed the Trump administration to move forward with depopulating the Department of Education (14 July 2025)

To Know How Much

The most ignorant are the most conceited.  To know how much there is that we do not know, is one of the most valuable parts of our attainments; for such knowledge becomes both a lesson of humility and a stimulus to exertion.

-- Horace Mann (1796 - 1859), American education reformer and abolitionist, Lectures on Education (1855) Lecture 6

Foolish People

Foolish people -- when I say "foolish people" in this contemptuous way I mean people who entertain different opinions to mine.  If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

-- Jerome K. Jerome (1859 - 1927), English author, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Getting There

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.  When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.  The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another.  I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.

-- Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855), German mathematician, astronomer and physicist, Letter to Farkas Bolyai (2 September 1808)

Equally Convenient

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

-- Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912), French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science, Science and Hypothesis (1901), Preface, Dover abridged edition (1952), p. xxii

What Do We Get For That?

The total actual 2024 budget to run the country was about 7 trillion dollars.  That means the NASA budget was only 0.004 of the national budget -- less than half a percent.  For every hundred dollars the US government spent, it put 40 cents in the bucket for NASA.

And what do we get for that?  The Universe. 

Missions to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter.  Landers on Mars, telescopes that peer through the depths of the cosmos, a fleet of spacecraft monitoring the Sun, the star to which we owe our existence.  The abject awe and wonder of images of a glorious cosmos.  The first A in NASA is for Aeronautics, too; research that makes air travel better, faster, and safer.  NASA science includes observing and monitoring our own planet as well, making satellites that track our water, atmosphere, and land. NASA scientists study climate change, one of the single biggest existential threats to humanity.

NASA employs about 18,000 people across all 50 states (and that doesn't include contractors, of which I was one for many years, and people such as  academics who have NASA grants).  NASA partners with space agencies around the world, a diversified portfolio that guarantees the best scientific research always pushing past the cutting edge and accelerating our understanding of, well, everything. 

-- Philip Plait, Bad Astronomy Newsletter, "Trump threatens to eviscerate NASA" (2 June 2025)

Destroy The Institutions

The way the Trump administration treats many Americans is as a defeated enemy, not as fellow Americans.  Like, when you conquer a society by force, when you defeat another nation at war, you conquer them, you often will destroy the institutions that undergird it, to ensure pacification, to remain in power.  And then maybe you rebuild them in a form you like.  

I think what has been so confusing for so many people, because I think we tend to think everyone acts in good faith, is that the Trump folks are treating, like the EPA and Harvard, not as fellow Americans and American institutions that are trying to act for the good of America, but as a defeated enemy.  

-- David Plotz, host of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, on the show's 29 May 2025 episode "Why Destroy Harvard?" @25:50

Better And Smarter

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter.  And these both are one and the same.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951), Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England, In a letter to Paul Engelmann (1917) as quoted in The Idea of Justice (2010) by Amartya Sen, p. 31

Does Not

Truth does not blush.

-- Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c. 155 - c. 240), theologian in the early Christian church, known for his powerful denunciations of many influences he considered heretical, "Against the Valentinians" Adversus Valentinianos, 3.2

Very Nearly Allied

To tempt, and to be tempted, are things very nearly allied, and, in spite of the finest maxims of morality impressed upon the mind, whenever feeling has anything to do in the matter, no sooner is it excited than we have already gone vastly farther than we are aware of, and I have yet to learn how it is possible to prevent its being excited.

-- Catherine II of Russia aka Catherine the Great (1729 - 1796), Empress of Russia for more than three decades, Memoirs of the Empress Catherine II (1859)

Habeas Corpus

Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to -

-- Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, at a Senate hearing, responding when asked, "Secretary Noem, what is habeas corpus?" before being interrupted and corrected, New York Times  (20 May 2025)

Neither Knows Nor Tolerates

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.  There is no caste here.  Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.  In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.  The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.  The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.  It is, therefore, to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a State to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race. ...

The sure guarantee of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, National and State, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States without regard to race.

-- Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson (18 May 1896), which held that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed "separate but equal" accommodations by race; Plessy was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (17 May 1954), ending racial segregation in public schools [h/t Heather Cox Richardson]

Until He Has Tried

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.  The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), American philosopher, essayist, and poet, Essay "Self-Reliance"