What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

It profits him the whole world.

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“Love thy neighbor.”

If you do, the commandment is superfluous.

If you don’t, it’s futile.

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No one has yet discovered what makes life, or what “life” is. The god explanation is not merely unsatisfactory, it is indefensible.

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I, me …  this bundle of congenial accidents; this hunger for existence; this dread.

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Start of a letter to my theoretical biographer: “Dear Avenging Angel …”

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The Left has become Death, the destroyer of our civilization.

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Where there is ideology, there will be schism.

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Often the more you understand the less you forgive.*

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Christianity was begotten by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a sentimentalized Judaism.

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Religious persons  say, “If you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything.” I say, “If you can believe in ‘God’ you can believe in anything.”**

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The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

The more generous the government, the more robbed the people.

The more secure the government, the more threatened the people.

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Justice is elusive but judgment is inescapable.

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The Roman writer Terence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Why can’t I say the same? So much that people do remains incomprehensible to me.

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There’s an awful lot of condescension in compassion and an awful lot of contempt in condescension.

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Curse: May you survive to live in the world of your ideals.***

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Many a belief can survive persecution but not critical examination.

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A good thing about the Universe and Life is that they have no purpose.

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Sado-Marxism …

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Russia cast off the Soviet Union – and revealed itself to be much the same. A wolf in wolf’s clothing.

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We are more likely to believe what we overhear than what we’re told.

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Searching for your true self? How do you know which is your true self – the seeker or the sought?

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Nothing is kept as long and carefully as a grievance.

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Now in my tenth decade, I ask other old people what they think or feel about dying, and find almost all agree it is not that we will die that troubles us so much as how.

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To a writer: A reader is a reluctant visitor to your mind. He will not enter your labyrinth unless you bait the path with fascination. His wonder, his curiosity must be aroused, or his amusement.

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Comes a Marxist, comes twaddle.

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A writer needs to know that he has weaknesses, vices.

An actor only needs to know that other people have them.

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Charity is okay, but only when practiced by consenting adults in private.

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I often feel lonely but seldom want company.

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Some are born ordinary, some achieve ordinariness, and some have ordinariness thrust upon them. I can’t think of anyone who’s had ordinariness thrust upon him. But I do know lots of people who’ve achieved ordinariness. They were geniuses until they were five and then became ordinary for the rest of their lives.

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As attractive as a scandal.

As complex as an animal.

As simple as a blow.

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Wither is what I do, not where I go.

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It is a sound principle not to do harm. Beyond infancy no one can achieve so impossibly high an aim, but it is good to try.

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Trying to reason with a Believer is like trying to crack an egg on a pillow.

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Many “principles” that people hold are not principles but pieties.

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We find Heaven and Hell on earth. Hell is a collective operation. Heaven depends on private enterprise.

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We fear that they might do unto us what we would like to do unto them.

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The value of human life cannot be measured: human life is itself the measure of value. Trying to measure it is like trying to measure the wetness of water.

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Human life as such has no goal, no theme, no point, no plan, no program, no meaning. History is a soap opera.

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Whatever a government does it does badly.

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Anarchism, nihilism, communism. In each case, a feeling in search of a politics.

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There is no “sin” of greed. There is a “sin” of envy. Let us be free to work for our own maximum profit. Let us have abundance. Let us have feasts, rich harvests, generosity, might, novelty, and splendor.

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Any idea that needs a law to defend it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

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Footnotes:

*Quoted by P. J. O’Rourke, from an interview with me by The Times of London, as an epigraph for his book Holidays in Hell.

**Émile Leon Cammaerts (1878-1953) was a Belgian-born writer who lived and died in England, and who, in an essay on G. K. Chesterton, authored the famous quotation often wrongly attributed to Chesterton himself.: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” 

***P0ssibly plagiarized from a Chinese sage. I’m not sure.

 

Jillian Becker     March 5, 2024