Vico on three kinds of languages

"Three Kinds of Languages.

The first of these was a divine mental language by mute religious acts or divine ceremonies, from which there survived in Roman civil law the actus legitimi which accompanied all their civil transactions. This language belongs to religions by the eternal property that it concerns them more to be reverenced than to be reasoned, and it was necessary in the earliest times when men did not possess articulate speech.

The second was by heroic blazonings, with which arms are made to speak; this kind of speech survived in military discipline.

The third is articulate speech, which is used by all nations today."

-Giambattista Vico, The New Science

Extreme times

"Les extrémités se touchent."

Translation: "Extremes meet" or "Opposites touch"

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Part I, Art. VI, 26

On the Road

The road is always better than the inn."
From Don Quixote, Cervantes

"On roads, there are no ranks or classes. Only the men who travel."
From a Korean movie A Map Against the World

Merit counts

"Merit always counts, especially when the economy tanks."

Vartan Gregorian
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript2.html

"You can never have too many pieces of paper."
-A St. Louis University art history professor I met in Madrid, referring to degrees and certifications

Tocqueville on the importance of newspapers in democracy

"WHEN men are no longer united among themselves by firm and lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the co-operation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help you require that his private interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the others. This can be habitually and conveniently effected only by means of a newspaper; nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment. A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought, but that comes of its own accord and talks to you briefly every day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs.

Newspapers therefore become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal and individualism more to be feared. To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested schemes; but if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity. The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Ch. VI Of the Relations Between Public Associations and the Newspapers

Claude Monet Reading, by Renoir

If men were angels

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

-James Madison in Federalist #51

Society is a contract

"Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)