Humans perceive nothing as accidental, and this is no accident.
Impostor syndrome, n. The realization that you are, in fact, an impostor.
If you want to know what most people’s inner lives are like, imagine the Old Testament, but starring you instead of the Jews.
There is a happiness in widely-shared enforced misery that goes a long way toward explaining nostalgia for Stalinism, or broadcast television.
The Victorians used to tell us fiction rots the mind when in fact it rots the soul.
The soul of brevity is silence.
There are reference works that ought to exist but do not, being too much trouble to assemble. The Encyclopedia of Musical Plagiarism is one, and The Historical Atlas of English Pronunciation is another.
There is a surprising incuriosity about how one’s political opponents, apparently functioning humans, arrive at beliefs that will lead to the destruction of life on earth. Stupid and Evil are the popular theories of mind.
A single betrayal, revealed at the proper time, can retrospectively poison a man’s whole life.
It is a world of men who look like Unix system administrators, without the Unix system administration skills.