📚Marginalia

Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.

Time, the slow, measured passage of years, is not exactly what we think it is. Humans tend to break time up into manageable pieces “ night and day, the turning of the seasons, the passage of years, centuries, eons ” but in actuality time is all one piece, a river flowing endlessly from the beginning toward some incomprehensible goal.

The notion that any one person can describe ‘what really happened’ is an absurdity. If ten “ or a hundred ” people witness an event, there will be ten “ or a hundred ” different versions of what took place. What we see and how we interpret it depends entirely upon our individual past experience.

Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality; it is our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.

Overreacting could sometimes cause as much trouble as doing nothing.

Every person’s life is theirs by right. An individual’s life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to their life, nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing the means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man’s throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than the individuals that compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but to any notion that strikes the fancy of that society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters.

Life is precious. That’s why sacrifice for freedom is rational: it is for life itself and your ability to live it that you act, since life without freedom is the slow, sure death of self-sacrifice to the good of mankind-who is always someone else. Mankind is just a collection of individuals. Why should everyone’s life be more important, more precious, more valuable than yours? Mindless mandatory self-sacrifice is insane.

Nothing marks a man’s character better than his attraction to intelligence.

A little word of caution here, if you don’t mind. When you know that something’s going to happen, you’ll start trying to see signs of its approach in just about everything. Always try to remember that most of the things that happen in this world aren’t signs. They happen because they happen, and their only real significance lies in normal cause and effect. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you start trying to pry the meaning out of every gust of wind or rain squall. I’m not denying that there might actually be a few signs that you won’t want to miss. Knowing the difference is the tricky part.

There’s a peculiar dichotomy in the nature of almost anyone who calls himself a historian. Such scholars all piously assure us that they’re telling us the real truth about what really happened, but if you turn any competent historian over and look at his damp underside, you’ll find a storyteller, and you can believe me when I tell you that no storyteller’s ever going to tell a story without a few embellishments. Add to that the fact that we’ve all got assorted political and theological preconceptions that are going to color what we write, and you’ll begin to realize that no history of any event is entirely reliable.