The Art of Tetman Callis

“The object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of […]

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“The universe, the real universe, might actually be much, much larger than the part we see today, because the velocity of light is finite and therefore we cannot look infinitely far. By looking into the sky with a telescope, we can only see as far as light can have travelled since the beginning of the […]

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“Some married people report pain or inflammation, and others will tell you that a well-adjusted partner feels no need to touch the other. To me, though, marriage had always seemed more like one of those medical procedures that, once performed, could never be undone.” – Garielle Lutz, “Fathering”

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“The knowledge we have creates the new questions we must ask.” – Johann Rafelski, The Structured Vacuum: Thinking About Nothing

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“The information you have is not the information you want. The information you want is not the information you need. The information you need is not the information you can obtain. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.” – Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods

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“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive.” – Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

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“You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.” – Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor

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“It’s OK to be wrong; it’s unforgivable to stay wrong.” – Marty Zweig

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“Risk only money. Never your freedom. Better to wash dishes. It will do less harm to your élan than four days in prison.” – Walter Serner, Last Loosening: A Handbook for Imposters and Those Who Aspire to Be (trans. Lydia Davis)

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“I’ve come to believe that Frenchmen are really nothing but Germans with chic accents” – Stephen M. Silverman, The Quarterly 2, Summer 1987

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“If a society believes that the most important thing is to be first, much that is evil will pass for good, while the voice of the truly necessary innovator gets lost in the general hubbub of originality. In the meantime, for better or worse the world is speeded up, perhaps to the point of panic […]

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“Murders committed in the morning seldom involve alcohol or drugs.” – Brian Innes, Profile of a Criminal Mind

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“Perhaps the most striking fact about the organized religious life of the colonials in the eighteenth century is the large number of people who were left out of it. Whether they had lost their faith before migrating or had been torn loose from church life in the business of moving, or whether they resented the […]

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“The ideal of the simple yeoman living close to nature, applying himself with loving care to the soil, and supplying virtually all his modest needs with his own labor and that of his family was an ideal first of the educated elite who read pastoral poetry and later of agrarian ideologues and politicians who wanted […]

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“The Negro as beast: it is always convenient and comfortable to believe that those who are about to be either killed or exploited mercilessly are something less than human, and hence available to be used for the benefit of humans. The dehumanization of the object is an important psychological precondition of destruction, and it is […]

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“Before the arrival of Europeans the peoples of West Africa had lived under a number of remarkable empires of considerable diversity. Many of these peoples were pastoral, some were agricultural; they fished, they traded extensively, they developed skilled craftsmen, well-articulated codes of law, and highly sophisticated sculpture and music. Some African cities, such as Benin, […]

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“For many thousands of servants their term of indentured servitude was a period of enforced celibacy. Marriage without the consent of the master was illegal, and the crimes of fornication and bastardy figure importantly in the records of bound servitude—not surprisingly, when we realize how many of the servant population were between the ages of […]

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“Among the by-products of English Social change of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a very substantial pool of criminal talents. The laws devised to suppress the criminal population were so harsh—scores of crimes were defined as felonies and hanging was a standard punishment for many trivial offenses—that England would have been launched upon mass […]

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“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against […]

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“Led by a young lawyer, Francis Daniel Pastorius, who was charmed at the prospect of taking a community to lead ‘a quiet, godly, and honest life in a howling wilderness,’ in 1683 a pioneer group settled in what was to be called Germantown, not far from Philadelphia, which became a center where German immigrants collected […]

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“It is hard now to imagine, but it is a matter of record that the mid-eighteenth-century mariner approaching the American strand could detect the fragrance of the pine trees about 60 leagues, or 180 nautical miles, from land.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait

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“The conspiracy plot always has the same logic. The reason no one knows about the conspiracy is because of the conspiracy. Not because it doesn’t exist.” – Reed Berkowitz, “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon”

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“One legend of the Yurok people says that, far out in the Pacific Ocean but not farther than a canoe can paddle, the rim of the sky makes waves by beating on the surface of the water. On every twelfth upswing, the sky moves a little more slowly, so that a skilled navigator has enough […]

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“The English colonies of the North American mainland, the rude provinces that would in time form the nucleus of the United States, were the elements of the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalist […]

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“What you learned as a child. Silence hurts as much as yelling. The lack of a holding hand, bad as a slap. Missing, worse than drunk, sad, or angry.” – Melissa Ostrom, “Flog, lash”

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“With the act of naming that which is in flux, what is in movement becomes shaped and what is inside becomes manifest. To give a name is to bring into existence and recognition. In Indian mythology, Brahma created apparitions from his unconscious; then the world guardian, Daksha, gave the apparitions names so that they might […]

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