Everything will be all right. And, even if it won’t be, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.

Alexei Navalny

You don't try comedy. You do it or you don't do it.

John Candy to Conan O'Brien on comedy

Successful politicians “pick fights” on contested issues where the bulk of voters are on their side. Polarizing policies frame a choice for voters, defining a candidate or party. A conflict-craving media invariably focuses on those issues, further elevating their political salience. If your polarizing policies are unpopular in the middle, you will be unpopular.

Oren Cass on politics

To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it. One of the many tragedies of this arrangement is that the people it makes miserable can nonetheless become its most loyal defenders. An extreme example from recent years is the incel phenomenon, whereby men who feel excluded from conventional masculinity develop a violent attachment to it. Nerd culture as a whole often exhibits the same dynamic. The nerd is not the opposite of the jock but a different iteration of the same logic. Nerds have their own flavor of macho. Rather than relinquishing the script, they find alternative ways to perform it.

Ben Tarnoff on masculinity

We believe a place the size of Helena containing the refinement, intelligence, and wealth that our city does, will very soon see the necessity of acquiring parks, improving our streets and generally beautifying our town.

Annual Report of the Helena Improvement Society, January 1, 1900

Monk, though no less skilled on his instrument, had a different way of showing it. He traded speed for space, which he punctuated with percussive, angular figures that matched their distinctive harmonic complexity (and, sometimes, harmonic starkness) with extraordinary micro-timing and a variety of attacks. His style was no less difficult to achieve than those of his peers, but its brilliance was less evident even to ostensible cognoscenti.

Richard Brody on Thelonious Monk's underappreciated style

Health lies in action, and so it graces youth. To be busy is the secret of grace, and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.

Will Durant on good health

He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.

Seneca on suffering