Max B. on Fate:

"Often I have presentiments of evil; but, never having had one of them fulfilled, I am beginning to ignore them. I find that I have always walked straight, serenely imprescient, into whatever trap Fate has laid for me."

On emotion:

"In every one of us the deepest emotions are constantly caused by some absurdly trivial thing, or by nothing at all. Conversely, the great things in our lives--the true occasions for wrath, anguish, rapture, what not--very often leave us quite calm. We cannot depend on any right adjustment of emotion to circumstance. That is on of many reasons which prevent the philosopher from taking himself and his fellow-beings quite so seriously as he would wish."

Natural Selection by Clive James

The gradual but inexorable magic
That turned the dinosaurs into the birds
Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.
To start the squadrons climbing from the herds
No wand was ever waved, but afterwards
Those who believed there must have been a wizard
Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.

And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever
Transitions, intricate beyond belief!
The little lobsters, in their mating fever,
Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,
And swept inland as scorpions. But if
Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder
He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.

Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure
And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,
Without a moral sense that we can measure,
And thus without a mind. Better by far
To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear
A conscious mechanism of mutation
Bringing its fine intentions to fruition

Without a qualm about collateral horror.
The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.
Nobody calls the ugly one an error.
But when a child is born to pain intense
Enough to drive its family all at once
To weep blood, an intelligent designer
Looks like a torture garden's beaming owner.

No, give it up. The world demands our wonder
Solely because no feeling brain conceived
The thumb that holds the bamboo for the panda.
Creation, if the thing's to be believed —
And only through belief can life be loved —
Must do without that helping hand from Heaven.
Forget it, lest it never be forgiven.

(Poetry (Chicago), November 2006)

I'm very doubtful about that "solely." Nevertheless, as a statement of naturalist disbelief, this strikes me as pretty well untoppable.

Kingsley Amis pretending to be Robert Conquest (dead today, at 98) on the murderous awfulness of Soviet Communism: "I told you so, you fucking fools."

J. Barzun on Columbus' bum rap:

"The Spanish colonists committed atrocities from greed and and racist contempt that nothing can palliate or excuse. But to blame Colombus is a piece of retrospective lynching; he was not the master criminal inspiring all the rest. It is moreover a mistake to think that because the native peoples were the sufferers, all of them were peaceable innocents. The Caribs whom Columbus first encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who occupied the islands. The Aztecs whom Cortez conquered had originally descended from the north and destroyed the previous civilization. To the north and east many of the tribes lived in perpetual warfare, the strong exploiting the weak, and several—notably the Iroqouis—had slaves. In short, what happened on the newfound hemisphere in early modern times continued the practice of the old: in Ancient Greece alien tribes marching in from the north; likewise in the making of the Roman Empire, in the peopling of the British Isles by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans; In France, Italy, and Spain by Franks, Normans, Lombards, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and later, by Arabs. Everywhere the story is one of invasion, killing, rape, and plunder and occupation of the land that belonged to the vanquished. Today, this fusion or dispersion of peoples is abhorred in principle but flourishing in fact. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are still theaters of conquest and massacre. And Columbus is not the responsible party."

M. Beerbohm on friendship:

"Old friends are generally the refuge of unsociable persons."

On royalty and government:

"There are some persons who would fain abolish altogether the institution of royalty. Our royal family is a rather absurd institution, no doubt. But then, humanity itself is rather absurd. A State can never be more than a kindergarten, at best, and he who would fain rule men according to principles of right reason will fare no better than did poor dear Plato at Syracuse. Put the dream of doctrinaire into practice, and it will soon turn to some such nightmare as modern France or Modern America. Indeed, fallacies and anomalies are the basis of all good government."

J. Barzun on Christopher Colombus, cranks, and innovators:

"The whole saga, including the sailors' distrust and their leader's deliberate deception; the success and the mistake at the heart of it; the glorification followed by the disgrace during and after the second voyage (the hero led back in chains); the persistence and the final neglect and poverty—every feature of his career is part of a typical pattern. Not all, but many of the great achievements of western man have followed this tortuous course, visiting more or less harsh punishment on the doers. This "tradition" is not the result of perversity. It is not the clash of stupid men opposing an intelligent one: Columbus's interviewers were right to question his calculation of the distance to India: he made it 2,400 miles short of the actual 10,600. And it is true that the promoters of the really new more often look and talk like cranks and mis-state or mistake their goal. Their behavior is often arrogant or seems so from their impatience with cautious minds. The upshot—humiliation and penury—is disproportionate to the offense, but it expresses the culture's need to defend its rational ways, to ward off genuine cranks, and to avoid moving too fast into the untried. There is no evidence that the present system of subsidizing innovations—government and foundation grants—works any better than that of the kings and queens of earlier times: the same committee is always sitting at the gate."

Max Beerbohm on writing history:

"To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would require a far less brilliant pen than mine."

IB Singer on polygamy:

"It's one thing to have an adventure—it's quite another to make a permanent institution out of it."

Michael Oakeshott on love:

“The phenomenon of love, perhaps, more than anything else, shows the secondary place of justice and morality in human life.”

John Gray on Michael Oakeshott.

Max Beerbohm on Philosophy:

"I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than another. That in itself is a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one I can make head or tail of."