The Art of Tetman Callis

“It has been observed by an honorable gentleman, that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved, that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government.—Their very character was tyranny; […]

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“The most damnable thing in the world is a servile copyist!” – Admiral John Fisher (quoted by Winston Churchill in The World Crisis)

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“It is customary for thoughtless people to jeer at the old diplomacy and to pretend that wars arise out of its secret machinations. When one looks at the petty subjects which have led to wars between great countries and to so many disputes, it is easy to be misled in this way. Of course such […]

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“Society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.” – Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

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“We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.” – Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

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“The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty.” – Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

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“You never merely write; you write to someone.” – Deborah E. Bouchoux, Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers (emphasis in original)

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“Reasons briefely set downe by the auctor to perswade every one to lerne to singe. First, it is a knowledge easely taught, and quickly learned, where there is a good master, and an apt scoller. Second, the exercise of singing is delightful to nature, and good to preserve the health of Man. Third, it doth […]

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“The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in […]

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“Like a crack in a plank of wood which cannot be sealed, the difference between the worker and the intellectual was ineradicable in Socialism. Organized Socialism bore the name Workingmen’s Association but in fact it was never any such thing. It was a movement not of, but on behalf of, the working class, and the […]

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“A careful education of youth, and strict family government, will operate like leaven—and lay a foundation to hope for better fruit from the rising generation, than ought to have been expected from the generality of those at present on the stage, had we considered the dissipation of the times when their manners were forming. Children […]

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“No form of government can make a vicious and ignorant people happy.—When the majority of our citizens becomes corrupt, even our well ballanced constitution cannot save us from slavery and ruin. Let it therefore be the unceasing study of all who love their country, to promote virtue and dispense knowledge through the whole extent of […]

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“For unskilled and unorganized labour, working conditions matched the slums. At the Shawfield Chemical Works in Glasgow in 1897, year of the Diamond Jubilee, workmen received 3d. or 4d. an hour for a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, spent amid poisonous vapors without a lunch-hour rest. They ate lunch standing at the furnaces and […]

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“In the slums people lived three to a bedroom of 700 cubic feet or, with children, eight and nine in a space of 1,200 cubic feet. Vermin lived with them, a piece of paper on the floor served as a toilet, fish on Sundays was the weekly protein for a family of eight, at two […]

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“To accomplish the ends of Society by being equal to Contingencies infinite, demands the deposit of power great and extensive indeed in the hands of Rulers. So great, as to render abuse probable, unless prevented by the most careful precautions: among which, the freedom & frequency of elections, the liberty of the Press, the Trial […]

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“In a free government, the voice of the people, expressed by the votes of a majority, must be the rule, or we shall be left without any certain rule to determine what is politically right. To depart from it, is establishing tyranny by law. It would be a solemn renunciation of the forms and substance […]

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“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled, censored, by persons who have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is every action and transaction to be registered, stamped, taxed, patented, licensed, assessed, measured, reprimanded, corrected, frustrated. Under pretext of the public good it is to be exploited, monopolized, […]

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“The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The role of the State would be replaced by voluntary cooperation among individuals and the role of the […]

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“They came from the warrens of the poor, where hunger and dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boiling cabbage and stale beer, where babies wailed and couples screamed in sudden quarrels, where roofs leaked and unmended windows let in the cold blasts of winter, where […]

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“So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914.” – Barbara Tuchman, […]

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“Are we to consider men entrusted with power as the receptacles of all the depravity of human nature? By no means. The people do not part with their full proportions of it. Reason and revelation both deceive us, if they are all wise and virtuous. Is not history as full of the vices of the […]

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“Friends, let me tell you: Sitting outside and reading is not a difficult art to master.” – Matt Bell, Facebook, June 25, 2014.

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“No kind of Accusation is so readily made, or so easily believ’d, by Knaves as the Accusation of Knavery.” – Benjamin Franklin, letter to Philadelphia Federal Gazette, April 8, 1788

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“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

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“The supposition of universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning than the supposition of universal rectitude. The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind, which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence. And experience justifies the theory: It has been […]

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“There are some, who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community, or in the Legislature, as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which […]

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“The internet is, in effect, a library of unimaginable size—full, as all libraries are, of news, gossip, archive material and other stuff which may to varying degrees be irrelevant, wrong or mad. It has made the best and worst of such information more freely available than ever before. Search engines should be like library catalogues—comprehensive […]

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“An attention to the judgment of other nations is important to every government for two reasons: The one is, that independently of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desireable on various accounts, that it should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy: The second is, […]

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“All writers on government agree, and the feelings of the human mind witness the truths of these political axioms, that man is born free and possessed of certain unalienable rights—that government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, […]

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Gravel Magazine’s November 2014 issue has been published, and includes one of my stories — “Guys Come in Three Sizes.” http://www.gravelmag.com/tetman-callis.html

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