QUOTES

Taft, Robert A.

''Political power over other nations, however benevolent its purposes, leads inevitably to imperialism.

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden Pond.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord Of The Rings

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost;
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
From the shadows a light shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
Crownless again shall be king...

He was made of the bones of the Earth.

Tuchman, Barbara W. The March of Folly

To qualify as folly ... the policy adopted must meet three criteria:

it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.
Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available.
To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

Corollaries of Folly

Folly's appearance is independent of era or locality. ...monarchy, oligarchy and democracy produce it equally.
...folly in government has more impact on more people than individual follies, and therefore governments have a greater duty to act according to reason.
Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, ... consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.
[Solon's] decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.
Like all follies ... an activist policy when doing nothing would have served as well.
... two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a surprise.
The folly in both cases [the German decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916, and the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor] belongs to the category of self-imprisonment in the "we-have-no-alternative" argument and in the most frequent and fatal of self-delusions - underestimation of the opponent.
This curious vacuum of understanding came from what might be called cultural ignorance, a frequent component of folly.
The impulse came from the compelling lure of dominion, from pretensions of grandeur, from greed.
A principle that emerges in the cases so far mentioned is that folly is a child of power. We all know, from unending repetitions of Lord Acton's dictum, that power corrupts. We are less aware that it breeds folly; that the power to command frequently causes failure to think; that the responsibility of power often fades as its exercise augments.
The ultimate outcome of a policy is not what determines its qualification as folly. All misgovernment is contrary to self-interest in the long run, but may actually strengthen a regime temporarily. It qualifies as folly when it is a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrablty unworkable or counter-productive.
The existence of the legend can tell us only one thing: that Laocoon was fatally punished for perceiving the truth and warning of it.
"Fate" as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.
Folly, in the form of absorption in shortsighted power struggles and perverse neglect of the Church's real needs...
He [Cardinal D'Amboise] too had become infected by the virus of folly - or ambition, its large component.
Folly, in one of its aspects, is the obstinate attachment to a disserviceable goal.
It is the persuasive argument of real-politik, which, as history has often demonstrated, has a corollary: that the process of gaining power employs means that degrade or brutalize the seeker, who wakes to find that power has been possessed at the price of virtue - or moral purpose - lost.
Supreme office, like sudden disaster, often reveals the man...
Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them [the Popes of the Renaissance] was a primary folly
...Personal self-interest belongs to every time and becomes folly when it dominates government.
Illusion of permanence, of the inviolability of their power and status, was a third folly [of the Renaissance Popes].
Their [the Renaissance Popes] three outstanding attitudes - obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status - are persistent aspects of folly.

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror

Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God's purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God's work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possiblity of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.

"As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper." Quote from Charles V, King of France.

What government, O wise price, has ever succeeded in triumphing over public conscience supported by reason? What punishments are available to subjugate a free soul?" Juan I, King of Castile, to Charles V of France.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change.

A folie de grandeur, or just such "fantasies of omnipotence" as define megalomania...

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.

Given a religious motive, economic fear can rise to fury.

Twain, Mark

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
An ethical man is a Christian holding four aces.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog.
The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

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