Great Thinkers. Great Thoughts.

Thomas Jefferson's Ten Rules

1. Never put off tomorrow what you can do today.
2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have earned it.
4. Never buy what you don't want because it is cheap.
5. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.
6. We seldom repent of having eaten too little.
7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
8. How much pain the evils have cost us that never happened.
9. Take things always by the smooth handle.
10. When angry, count ten before you speak, if very angry, count a hundred.

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The Gods of the Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Rudyard Kipling
1919

"Few men will anything very strongly, and out of these few, only a tiny minority are capable of combining strength of will with unwavering continuity. Most human beings are spasmodic and intermittent creatures, who like above everything the pleasures of mental indolence. "It is for this reason," says Bryce, "that a strenuous and unwavering will sometimes becomes so tremendous a power, almost a hypnotic force." Lucifer is the highest mythological incarnation of this intense personal will, and the great men who have embodied it upon the stage of history participate, to some extent, in his satanic strength and magnificence. It is because of this strength and magnificence, so very different from our own weakness and mental squalor, that we continue to hark back nostalgically to the biographies of such men as Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and that, as each new imitator of Lucifer arises, we prostrate ourselves before him, begging him to save us."

Aldous Huxley
GREY EMINENCE

"History tends at times to become suddenly concentrated in one man, who is then obeyed by the world.  These great individuals represented the coincidence of the general and the particular, of the static and the dynamic, in one personality.  Their nature is one of the true mysteries of world history.  Their relationship to their time is a hieros gamos ( sacred marriage).  Such a union can only be consummated in terrible times, which provide the one supreme standard of greatness and are also unique in their need of great men." 

Jacob Burckhardt
REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY
1950

"The first thing that confronts man in the form of Destiny is the time and place of his birth. This is an inescapable fact; no amount of thought can comprehend its origin, and no will can avert it. Moreover, it is the most decisive fact of all. Everyone is born into a people, a religion, a class, an age, a culture. It is Destiny that determines whether a man be born a slave in Periclean Athens, a knight at the time of the Crusades, or a laborer's or rich man's son in our own day. If anything can be called fate, fortune, or destiny, it is this. History means that life is constantly changing. For the individual, however, life is precisely thus and so, and not otherwise. With his birth the individual receives his nature and a particular range of possible tasks, within which he has the privilege of free choice. Whatever his nature wills or is capable of, whatever his birth allows or prevents, for every individual there is prescribed a definite range of happiness or misery, greatness or cowardice, tragedy or absurdity, which will make up his life only. What is more, Destiny determines whether his life is to have significance for the lives of those around him, that is to say, whether it will be meaningful for history."

Oswald Spengler
PESSIMISM?
1921

“The centuries of scholasticism are the centuries in which the tradition of ancient science and philosophy was simultaneously reconstituted, assimilated, and tested for adequacy.  As weak spots were discovered, they immediately became foci for the first effective research in the modern world.  The great new scientific theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all originate from rents torn by scholastic criticism in the fabric of Aristotelian thought.  Most of those theories also embody key concepts created by scholastic science.  And more important even than these is the attitude that modern scientists inherited from their medieval predecessors: an unbounded faith in the power of human reason to solve the problems of nature.  As the late Professor Whitehead remarked, "Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”

Thomas Kuhn
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
1957