Food For Thought

[see also: HUMILITY]

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself.

[see also: FOOD]

Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Their soul abhorred all manner of meat: and they were even hard at death's door.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.

Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route.... It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.

People divide off vice and virtue as though they were two things, neither of which had with it anything of the other. This is not so. There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter -- things which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners -- your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards -- who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.

Some people draw a comforting distinction between "force" and "violence." ...I refuse to cloud the issue by such word-play.... The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence.... Call an elephant a rabbit only if it gives you comfort to feel that you are about to be trampled to death by a rabbit.

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.

The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them.

If human beings are to survive in a nuclear age, committing acts of violence may eventually have to become as embarrassing as urinating or defecating in public are today.

To use violence is to already be defeated.

[see also: SEX]

C'est une des superstitions de l'esprit humain d'avoir imagine que la virginite pouvait etre une vertu.
(It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.)

He who possesses virtue in abundance
May be compared to an infant.

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues, and those who proceed very slowly may, provided they always follow the straight road, really advance much faster than those who, though they run, forsake it.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Man seems capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.

We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class. The enfranchisement of women is a part of the vast movement to enfranchise all mankind. You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do you when ten elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to two hundred thousand, and only one eleventh to the rest of the forty millions? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. Outside the context of a free society, who would want to die for the right to vote? Yet that is what the American soldiers were asked to die for -- not even for their own vote, but to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese, who had no other rights and no knowledge of rights or freedom.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.