Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

The mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied nor extenuated.

- J.S. Mill, The Utility of Religion

(HT: Adam Gopnik)

Also worth your time: You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requires.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

- Catullus, Poem 85

I hate and love. You wonder, perhaps, why I’d do that?
I have no idea. I just feel it. I am crucified.

(Translation: Peter Green)

- W.B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

(HT: Conor Foley)

One of the remarkable effects of a smoothly fitting public surface is that it protects one from the sense of exposure without having to be in any way dishonest or deceptive, just as clothing does not conceal the fact that one is naked underneath.

- Thomas Nagel, Concealment and Exposure

Magic and language are practically the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive. Don’t doubt that for a moment. As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent – which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers – will have their lives altered and affected – seriously affected – by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is - nine out of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It’s like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a real occupational hazard.

- Alan Moore, Interview

He lives well who lives lightly,
hoards nothing,
lets go the air he breathes—
to draw in more.

- Peter Abbs, The Flowering of Flint

Her arms have the beauty
Of a gently moving bamboo.
Her eyes are full of peace.
She is faraway,
Her place not easy to reach.
My heart is frantic
With haste
A ploughman with a single ox
On land all wet
And ready for seed.

- AK Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War

(HT: William Dalrymple)

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

- J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

(Wislawa Szymborska, True Love)