1. Nothing and no one is immune from criticism.
2. Everyone involved in a controversy has an intellectual responsibility to inform himself of the available facts.
3. Criticism should be directed first to policies, and against persons only when they are responsible for policies, and against their motives or purposes only when there is some independent evidence of their character.
4. Because certain words are legally permissible, they are not therefore morally permissible.
5. Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
6. Do not treat an opponent of a policy as if he were therefore a personal enemy of the country or a concealed enemy of democracy.
7. Since a good cause may be defended by bad arguments, after answering the bad arguments for another's position present positive evidence for your own.
8. Do not hesitate to admit lack of knowledge or to suspend judgment if evidence is not decisive either way.
9. Only in pure logic and mathematics, not in human affairs, can one demonstrate that something is strictly impossible. Because something is logically possible, it is not therefore probable. "It is not impossible" is a preface to an irrelevant statement about human affairs. The question is always one of the balance of probabilities. And the evidence for probabilities must include more than abstract possibilities.
10. The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion.
Suggested rules for democratic discourse, from "The Ethics of Controversy"
We share half of our genome with the banana, a fact more evident in some of my acquaintances than others.
At Davos 2001
Slowly, we're bringing the risks of online banking to projectile weaponry.
In RISKS digest 21.02
I must tell you that it will mean some change in your writing style. All four-letter words must be omitted and, in future, please no references to screwing, buggery or to any perverted acts. I admit that won't leave you much to write about, but that's the price of loyalty.
In a letter to Mordecai Richler
Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.
There is no clearly traceable figure or pattern in this phase of his life. If he knew where he was going, it is not apparent from this distance. He fell down a great deal during this period, because of a trick he had of walking into himself.
From the introduction to The Thurber Carnival
Recipe for Loon Soup: Do not make loon soup.
The Eskimo Cookbook
We must avoid duplication of effort, because that is being done by others.
To attack a man for talking nonsense is like finding your mortal enemy drowning in a swamp and jumping in after him with a knife.
None could break the Web, no wings of fire. / So twisted the cords, & so knotted / The meshes: twisted like to the human brain.
The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad.
Last Chance to See
Only reason can convince of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
Civilization
When one has stopped loving somebody, one feels that he has become someone else, even though he is still the same person.
The Pillow Book
Canadians are nice and fun; in fact, they are very much like us Americans, except they're smart. They know their history and ours.
"A Guide to Guided Tours"
The movie never ends, but if you wait long enough it gets to a point where it's over.
Reviewing Tidal Wave
After a beverage offered by Mrs. X and some polite chat, we all board the X's fashionable all-terrain vehicle -- a necessity for their active, all-terrain lifestyle -- all terrains in this case being concrete, asphalt, pavement, and cement.
Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
"Philip Massinger", in The Sacred Wood
And now, I feel myself becoming impatient with Olmsted. Why can't he just get on with it? We expect the lives of people -- especially people who achieve great things -- to neatly follow a grand design. I think of Michelangelo or Mozart or Cézanne. Their lives resemble a game of building blocks. The blocks at the bottom are arranged first and not haphazardly, since they will support the upper levels. As the construction progresses, and more blocks are added, the structure gets taller and taller. It is carefully assembled so as not to topple. Following Olmsted's life is more like putting together a picture puzzle. All sorts of odd-shaped pieces are lying on the table. Two or three form a bit of sky, others a fragment of foliage. Here is something that might -- or might not -- be water. It's not yet clear how these fragments come together. Some pieces don't seem to fit anywhere. Yet all the pieces of the jigsaw are necessary. Only when the last piece is in place -- when the puzzle is complete -- does the design make itself evident.
A Clearing in the Distance
Are you guys really old, or do you just read a lot?
Frank Conniff's favorite MST3K fan letter
You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining.
In his Anti-Forward to The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
After Zot! finished its first ten issue run in late '85, I took a year and a half break (not entirely voluntary, since the book was losing money at the time) and, apart from moving office furniture, I also decided to do a giant-sized one shot filled with nothing but pure senseless violence from beginning to end. I have since been credited by Alan Moore with getting the 90's started four years early.
Describing his one-shot comic DESTROY!, on www.scottmccloud.com
Whenever I do things because I want to do it and because it seems fun or interesting and so on and so forth, it almost always works. And it almost always winds up more than paying for itself. Whenever I do things for the money, not only does it prove a headache and a pain in the neck and come with all sorts of awful things attached, but I normally don't wind up getting the money, either. So, after a while, you do sort of start to learn [to] just forget about the things where people come to you and dangle huge wads of cash in front of you. Go for the one that seems interesting because, even if it all falls apart, you've got something interesting out of it. Whereas, the other way, you normally wind up getting absolutely nothing out of it.
In an interview in January Magazine
It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War's chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the war's political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference in their ideology counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened, the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial outcasts, the persecution of ideology's intellectual and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments and the elevation of commissars, gauleiters and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in the chaos it left behind.
The First World War
... how much we really know about the vaults and caverns which lie somewhere under the structure of a great nation -- about these psychic catacombs in which all our concealed desires, our fearful dreams and evil spirits, our vices and our forgotten and unexpiated sins, have been buried for generations? In healthy times, these emerge as the spectres in our dreams. ... But suppose, now, that all of these things generally kept buried in our subconscious were to push their way to the surface, as in the blood-cleansing function of a boil? Suppose that this underworld now and again liberated by Satan bursts forth, and the evil spirits escape the Pandora's box?
In August 1936, from Diary of a Man in Despair