📚Marginalia

Tyranny cannot endure forever. By its very nature it rots everything it rules, including itself.

Everyone makes mistakes. How a person deals with their mistakes is a mark of their character.

Enemies are the price of honour.

We all hate what we become. I’m not the only one; I have seen women staring at themselves in restaurant mirrors while their husbands are away, women under their own spell as they see someone they do not recognize. I have seen men back from war, squinting at themselves in shopwindows as they feel their skull beneath their skin. They thought they would shed the worst of youth and gain the best of age, but time drifted over them, sand-burying their old hopes.

We are each the love of someone’s life.

An election’s nothing more than a popularity contest, and popularity’s hardly a measure of any kind of administrative ability.

It’s an article of the religion of every adolescent that he or she knows far more than his elders; the half-formed mind suffers fools almost ecstatically.

Evil thinks not to beguile us by unveiling the terrible truth of its festering intent, but comes, instead, disguised in the diaphanous robes of a virtue, whispering sweet-sounding lies intended to seduce us into the dark bed of our eternal graves.

Life is the future, not the past. The past can teach us, through experience, how to accomplish things in the future, comfort us with cherished memories, and provide the foundation of what has already been accomplished. But only the future holds life. To live in the past is to embrace what is dead. To live life to its fullest, each day must be created anew. As rational thinking beings, we must use intellect, not a blind devotion to what has come before, to make rational choices.

You don’t have any idea what love really is. You can’t love anyone or anything until you love your own existence, first. Love can grow out of a request for your own life. When you love yourself, your own existence, then you love someone who can enhance your existence, share it with you, make it more pleasurable. When you hate yourself and believe your existence is evil, then you can only hate, you can only experience the shell of love, that longing for something good, but you have nothing to base it in but hatred.