The Last Word

By Nicholas S. Desai | Friday, March 11, 2005

There are people for whom philosophy is a means of misleading others, for they misuse its great name, its attractions, and its integrity to give colour and gloss to their own errors.
—St. Augustine

One thing is needful.— To 'give style' to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Kubrick was always a 'master' who knew too much about film and too little about life—and it shows.
—David Thomson

Philosophical trouble arises through seeing a system of rules and seeing that things do not fit it. It is like advancing and retreating from a tree stump and seeing different things. We go nearer, remember the rules, and feel satisfied, then retreat and feel dissatisfied.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments. Rap songs use the same recipe: Dig through a crate of records, slice out a high hat and a bass line, and lay a new vocal track on top. Of course, the molecular structure of dead-tree journalism and classic rock is filthy with other people's research and other people's chord progressions. But in newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts. For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage.
—Josh Levin

As to the Court's invocation of the Lemon test: like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys of Center Moriches Union Free School District.... Over the years, however, no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature's heart (the author of today's opinion repeatedly), and a sixth has joined an opinion doing so.
—Antonin Scalia

Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them. To use language now popular, civic culture was neglected. And this turn in liberalism is what prepared us for cultural relativism.
—Allan Bloom

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit.
—Frank Herbert

Those who know me will confirm that while I may not be tidy, I am so clean you could eat your dinner off me.
—Christopher Hitchens

Marx himself said that he combined German philosophical, English economic, and French political ideas. And it is indeed in France that we first find Revolution in the sense of the complete destruction of the existing order, and its replacement by abstract concepts—these latter formulated by, and later dictatorially enforced by, theorists with no experience of real politics. The Revolution Idea then spread over half the world.
—Robert Conquest

I can't help it if I'm lucky.
—Bob Dylan

[Winston Churchill] was a lifelong sufferer from the depression that he nicknamed his 'black dog,' but he could rouse himself to action and commitment and inspiration, and the brandy bottle was often a crucial prop. I have taken more out of alcohol, he said simply, than it has taken out of me. His chief antagonist, Adolf Hitler, was, I need hardly add, a fanatical teetotaler (though with a shorter and less wholesome life span). The most lethal and fascistic of our current enemies, the purist murderers of the Islamic jihad, despise our society for, among other things, its tolerance of alcohol. We should perhaps do more to earn this hatred and contempt, and less to emulate it.
—Christopher Hitchens

When Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat.
—David Brooks

The Last Word

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