#thou

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. ↗

— William Westmoreland

#censorship #confused #ever #first #fought

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected. ↗

— Luc de Clapiers

#rejected #should #simply #thought #too

Vertigo, it was thought at the time, could only be caused by a disease of the cerebellum. He observed this kind of patient for years and saw absolutely no symptoms of brain disease. ↗

— Robert Barany

#brain #caused #could #disease #kind

I thought about that for a minute - about what I wanted. ↗

— Stephenie Meyer

#new-thought

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#abstract thought #exhausted #nothing #politics #remains

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. ↗

— Sofia Kovalevskaya

#impossible #mathematician #poet #soul #without

What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous. ↗

— John Green

#truth #doubt

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#ceases #exist #expression #freedom of expression #offend

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#independence #partisanship #politics #radicalism #iraq

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg