Quotes/Observations apropos of nothing

If you know English history you will have heard of Lord Palmerston, a prime minister and active participant in 19^th century foreign affairs.  Writing shortly after his death in 1865, Walter Bagehot makes this interesting observation:

“He was not a common man, but a common man might have been cut out of him.  He had in him all that a common man has, and something more.  And he did not at all despise, as some philosophers teach people to do, the common part of his mind.  He was profoundly aware that the common mass of plain sense is the great administrative agency of the world and that if you keep yourself in sympathy with this you will win, and if not you fail.”

And for those who are naturally late risers and wish affairs were conducted on a different clock, a glimpse into a better world:

“When I was a young man, the Duke of Wellington made an appointment with me at half-past seven in the morning, and some one asked me, why, Palmerston, how will you keep that engagement?  Oh, I said of course, the easiest thing in the world.  I shall keep it the last thing before I go to bed.”

Bagehot’s Historical Essays, (page 216 & 217)

More from Walter Bagehot

Walter Bagehot (1826 – 1877) was a banker, essayist, and one of the early editors of The Economist, with writings covering politics, finance, history, and literature. 

“How can a soul be a merchant?  What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the fall of butter, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp?  Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid?...The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basis.  All is incongruous.”

“The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.”

While strolling through a friend’s estate:

“Ah, you’ve got the church in the grounds.  It’s well the tenants shouldn’t be quite sure that the landlord’s power stops with this world.”

At breakfast, noticing his nephew Guy,when he was eight or nine, having trouble opening his egg:

“Go on, Guy.  Hit it hard on the head.  It has no friends.”

The other side of people

“We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon: in either case there is also a dark half which is unknown to us.  We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.”

Walter Bagehot

Friendship

Comments said or written to Sydney Smith:

"You have been making fun of me, Sydney, for 20 years, and I do not think you have said a single thing I should have wished you not to say."

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, page 534

Toleration

"We are none of us tolerant in what concerns us deeply and entirely."   Coleridge (1836)

Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence, page 273

Two more from Lord Byron

"I remember a methodist preacher who on perceiving a profane grin on the faces of part of his congregation exclaimed 'no hopes for them as laughs'"

"His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some such cant; and when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless."

Lord Byron, Selected Letters and Journals

Lord Byron - taste and its drawback

"If you enter his [the poet Rogers] house--his drawing room--his library--you of yourself say, this is not the dwelling of a common mind.  There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak of an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor.  But this very delicacy must be the misery of his existence.  Oh the jarrings his disposition must have encountered through life!"

Lord Byron; Selected Letters and Journals

Free speech

"...why in fact do we cherish the right to speak freely?  Because we have become a people with a variety of opinions about all sorts of matters and we do not see why we should not utter them.  We know there are limits to this right, but we know also that these limits have nothing whatever to do with 'truth' and 'error', but only with peace and tranquility.  The proper rationale of free speech, and the limits commonly imposed upon it by liberal-democratic governments, is not the belief that every utterance is a bona fide participation in a search for some one 'truth', but the belief that politics are not concerned with this sort of 'truth' at all.  They are concerned with the cultivation of what from time to time are accepted as the peacable decencies of conduct among men who do not suffer from the Purtian-Jacobin illusion that in practical affairs there is an attainable condition of things called 'truth' or 'perfection.'"

Michael Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, The Customer is Never Wrong , page 116
Review of Walter Lippman's The Public Philosophy

Peter Altenberg - destroying a man

From the essay on Peter Altenberg:

"There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe.  And that's already three things, and there are a lot more."

page 17, http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Amnesia-Necessary-Memories-History/dp/B00509CSJM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314325870&sr=1-1

Moynihan on Kennedy (with intimations of Obama)

On the tenth anniversay of President Kennedy's assassination:

"Very little has gone well for us: almost nothing as we would have wished.  Not all bad.  The high school rhetoric has been knocked out of us: no more torches....Had he lived we would mostly by now be half ashamed and half angry at the too great submission of our own persons to his persona.  A wholly dangerous: an infantile thing."    November 22, 1973, (page 316)

The high school rhetoric, the torches, the infantile submission to a persona would return

Moynihan on health care plans

I would assume there are important differences between the Clinton health care plan and what was eventually passed as 'Obamacare.'  But as the latter is currently being challenged in court with some success because of the individual mandate which requires a person to buy health insurance, the following is at least suggestive:

"I don't want to seem antagonistic [Moynihan was after all a democrat], but I have to tell you I very much share Martha Derthick's comment that in a lifetime of reading government proposals for social security, she had never come across one as coercive as that of the Clinton health care plan." 
May 19, 1995 (page 631)

Moynihan -thoughts for our times

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a professor at Harvard, Ambassador to India and the UN, part of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, and of course Senator from New York.  The collection of letters put together by Steven Weisman presents a wide view into his thinking.  While the letters are naturally about events as they presented themselves they speak to current events as well.

For example the riots in London bring to mind a letter reflecting on an essay published in The Public Interest:

“His central point [Paul Weaver] – an immensely disturbing one—is that the social system of American and British democracy that grew up in the 18^th and 19^th century was able to be exceedingly permissive with regard to public matters precisely because it could depend on its citizens to be quite disciplined with respect to private ones.  He speaks of ‘private systems of authority,’ such as the family, church, and local community, and political party, which regulated behavior, instilled motivation, etc., in such a way as to make it unnecessary for the state to intervene in order to protect ‘the public interest.’  More and more it would appear that these subsystems are breaking down in the immense city of New York.  If this should continue, democracy would break down.”

Letter to President Nixon, January 1969, page 169 -170
http://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Patrick-Moynihan-Portrait-Visionary/dp/B004KAB2ZI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314130868&sr=1-1

Political philosophers/philosophy

"It is characteristic of political philosophers that they take a sombre view of the human situation: they deal in darkness. Human life in their writings appears, generally, not as a feast or even a journey, but as a predicament; and the link between politics and eternity is the contribution the political order is conceived as making to the deliverance of mankind....Man, so the vaied formula runs, is the dupe of error, the slave of sin, of passion, of fear, of care, the enemy of himself or others or of both, and the civil order appears as the whole or a part of the scheme of his salvation....

It will not then surprise us to find an apparent contingent element in the ground and inspiration of a political philosophy, a feeling for the exigencies, the cares, the passions of a particular time, a sensitiveness to the dominant folly of an epoch: for the human predicament is a universal appearing everywhere as a particular."

M. Oakeshott, Introduction to Leviathan

Oakeshott on Religion

"The gift of a religious faith is that of a reconciliation to the unavoidable dissonances of a human condition, a reconciliation which is neither a denial, nor a substitute for remedial effort, nor a theoretical understanding in which the mystery of their occurrence is abated or even dispelled, but a mode of acceptance, a 'graceful' response...

He is fortunate where he has a religion, a traditio, of notable imaginative splendor to draw upon; and while this reconciliation may be no more than that of a somewhat anxious equanimity or a patiently nurtured hope, it is as complete as it may be when it is a release from care and generates an unostentatious, unaccusing serenity in conduct."

On Human Conduct, Michael Oakeshott, 1975

Quotes - John Buchan

In a post over on Contentions, Peter Wehner quotes John Buchan as follows: “My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.” http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/10/civilization-barbarism-london/#more-763424

Never having heard of Buchan, I looked him up on Wikipedia and found this:

“It's a great life, if you don't weaken.”

“No great cause is ever lost or won; the battle must always be renewed, and the creed must always be restated.”

Quote for Today

"...our rulers now manage so much of our lives that they cannot help but do it badly."

Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind

Sunday Mornings

"People don’t read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath.  Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974 like I was slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times.  Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:

I noticed something!"
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Moynihan on Political Ideas

"Political ideas must be simple.  Which is not to say they must be facile.  To the contrary, the most profound propositions are often the simplest as well.  Whitehead's [Alfred North] rule to 'seek simplicity and distrust it' is appropriately cautionary, but he did first of all say: Seek simplicity."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Counting Our Blessings, page 330

Oakeshott on Politics

"Some unfortunate people, like Pitt (laughably called 'the Younger') are born old and are eligible to engage in politics almost in their cradles; others, perhaps more fortunate, belie the saying that one is young only once, they never grow up.  But these are exceptions.  For most there is what Conrad called the 'shadow line' which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not of poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our emotions.  And coming to be at home in this commonplace world qualifies us (as no knowledge of 'political science' can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be political activity."

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, On Being Conservative

Moynihan on Liberals and Conservatives

"Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire through experience what conservatives seem to be endowed with from birth, namely a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good."