Witsky

Small doses of wit.

  1. Isn’t it cool that there’s a frozen leopard in Kilimanjaro?
  2. Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what.
  3. Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind;
  4. Whenever I thought of you I couldn’t help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You made a remark about ‘national character’ that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.
  5. Every boy, he said, has a little sweetheart.
  6. “I’m nobody,” Dickinson says. “Are you nobody, too? / Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell…”
  7. The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place ti is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.
  8. Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
  9. I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries.