It is trust inscribed

Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money.

Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed.

Not worth a brass farthing

Mark Twain from his Autobiography

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Resume the follies

From Winston Churchill's Triumph and Tragedy.

How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.

The longer effects of any act or policy

Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson, 1952, page 5.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. Those fallacies all stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups.

Nature, which remains deaf and inexorable to our wishes

From Galileo and the Scientific Pose of the Left by Robert Tracinski.

. . . as Galileo himself advised a fellow scientist, by doing experiments "you will be able to find out just how much force human authority has upon the facts of nature, which remains deaf and inexorable to our wishes."

This field of glory is harvested

Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address - The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois.

This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot.

A habit of attentive clarity

From Walter Russell Mead in his essay, Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind.

The Art of War is a handbook for living in an uncertain and dangerous world. It is dominated by paradox: training is necessary to produce a good general, but any general who comes to trust the rules he has learned is headed for defeat. The successful general will have studied The Art of War so profoundly that he ceases to trust it.

I was not reaching for hyperbole when I wrote that this is a book that wants to slap its readers in the face. Like a Zen monk trying to astonish and trick the novice into a moment of enlightenment, Sun Tzu seeks to surprise, to shock and ultimately to awaken his readers. He is not teaching a body of doctrine but a habit of mind: a habit of attentive clarity out of which can come true judgment and decisive action.

They augur misgovernment at a distance

Edmund Burke, On Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, Speech to Parliament, Mar. 22, 1775.

In other countries [than the American colonies], the people . . . judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

'Tis new to thee

From The Plagues of the Mind by Bruce S. Thorton, page 86.

Without that contextualizing distance we fall into the trap of what Gary Saul Morson calls "chronocentricism," the arrogant "temporal egotism" that judges everything by the standards and "knowledge" of the present, as though our accidental lateness confers on us greater wisdom instead of knowledge of a greater number of facts. But just as objects nearer to us appear bigger than they actually are, and we obliterate the sun with a thumb, so the ideas of the present take on an importance and heft that they might not deserve. Forgetting the wisdom of the Preacher that there is nothing new uunder the sun, we continually cry out like Shakespeare's Miranda "O brave new world!" and seldom hear the older, wiser Prospero snort, "'Tis new to thee."

The infinite variety of human experience

From Livy, The History of Rome in the preface to Book One

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.