Topic

Dependence

James: a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. Adams insists the woman known only through a man is known wrong — which extends beyond gender to any identity constituted entirely by another's view. Chesterton on losing determining how long before you win. Napoleon finds people more governable through their vices than their virtues — which is either political wisdom or a description of exploitation. Herbert: there would be no great men if there were no little ones. Roosevelt's vote-rifle places the moral weight on the user, not the instrument. These quotes are interested in the structures of reliance — what they enable, what they cost, and when they become traps that are harder to see from inside than out.

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I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

Source: An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, book 1 (1690)

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

If you own something you cannot give away, then you don't own it, it owns you.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user

Love is blind. That is why he always proceeds by the sense of touch

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one

As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible

But to us, probability is the very guide of life

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy

For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die