L’agitation et la chasse est proprement de nostre gibier: nous ne sommes pas excusables de la conduire mal et impertinemment; de faillir à la prise, c’est autre chose. Car nous sommes nais à quester la verité; il appartient de la posseder à une plus grande puissance. (Montaigne)

Agitation and the chase are properly our quarry; we are not excusable if we conduct it badly and irrelevantly; to fail in the catch is another thing. For we are born to quest after truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (Donald Frame, 1943)

Agitation, stirring and hunting, is properly belonging to our subject or drift; wee are not excusable to conduct the same ill and impertinently, but to misse the game and faile in taking, that’s another matter. For wee are borne to quest and seeke after trueth; to possesse it belongs to a greater power. (John Florio, 1603)

To hunt after truth is properly our business, and we are inexcusable if we carry on the chase impertinently and ill; to fail of seizing it is another thing, for we are born to inquire after truth: it belongs to a greater power to possess it. (Charles Cotton, 1685)

The real object of our hunting is excitement and the hunt itself; we have no excuse for conducting it badly and irrelevantly. To fail in capturing any thing is another matter, for we are destined from birth to quest the truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (George Burnham Ives, 1925)

The excitement of the chase is properly our quarry. We are not to be pardoned if we carry it on badly or foolishly; to fail to seize the prey is a different matter. For we are born search after the truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (Emil J. Trechmann, 1927)

The activity of the hunt is properly our business; we are not excused if we conduct it badly and unsuitably; to fail in seizing the prey is another thing. For we are born to quest after truth; to possess it belogs to a greater power. (Jacob Zeitlin, 1934)

The active pursuit of truth is our proper business. We have no excuse for conducting it badly or unfittingly. But failure to capture our prey is another matter. For we are born to quest after it; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (John M. Cohen, 1958)

The game which we hunt is the fun of the chase: we are inexcusable if we pursue it badly or foolishly: it is quite another thing if we fail to make a kill. For we are born to go in quest of truth: to take possession of it is the property of a greater Power. (M. A. Screech, 1987)

“A Lacedaemonian was asked what had made him live healthy so long. ‘Ignorance of medicine’, he replied. And the Emperor Hadrian kept crying out as he was dying that the crowd of doctors had killed him. BA bad wrestler turned doctor. ‘Take heart’, Diogenes said to him, ‘you are right; now you will bring down those who brought you down before’. But they have this luck, according to Nicocles, that the sun shines on their successes, and the earth hides their failures. And besides, they have a very convenient way of making use of all kinds of results; for the good and the health that fortune, nature, or some other extraneous cause (of which the number is infinite) produces in us, it is the privilege of medicine to attribute to itself. All the happy results that happen to the patient who is under its care are due to it. The circumstances that have cured me and that cure a thousand others who do not call the doctors to their aid, they usurp in the case of their patients. And as for the mishaps, either they completely disavow them, by attributing the blame to the patient, for reasons so frivolous that they cannot possibly fail to find always a good enough number of them: he uncovered his arm; he heard the noise of a coach… someone opened his window; he lay down on his left side; or some troublesome thought passed through his head — in short, a word, a dream, a look, seems to them sufficient excuse to put the blame off their own shoulders. Or, if they so please, they actually make use of our getting worse, and do their business by this other means that can never fail them, which is to reward us, when the disease has become hotter by their prescriptions, with the assurance they give us that it would have become even worse without their remedies. The man whom they have cast from a chill into a quotidian fever, without them would have had a continued fever. They need not worry about doing their job badly, since the damage turns to their profit. Truly they are right to require the full confidence of the patient; it must indeed be well-intentioned and very pliable to apply itself to notions so hard to believe.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“…wise men are reluctant to take charge, knowing that there are people who are still wiser and that it is they who should rule the world. Meanwhile, fools and villains leap into the breach, take charge of the world, and conduct it willfully and foolishly. This is how it happens that wise men allow idiots and criminals to destroy the world. Since the wise men are wise and growing ever wiser, what they regarded yesterday as ultimate wisdom they realize, a day later, is not wise after all. They seldom maintain a position or remain committed to anything, because wisdom keeps leading them a step further. Not so with fools. Whatever they fix their eyes on, they stick with, never letting go; should they let go, they’d have nothing. Their entire life is a strategy, a way to keep the world in their hands.” (S. Y. Agnon, Shira, tr. Zeva Shapiro)

החכמים מושכים ידיהם מהנהגת העולם, מפני שהם יודעים שיש חכמים מהם ורוצים שיתנהג העולם על ידי חכמים גמורים, בתוך כך קופצים הטפשים והרשעים ובאים ונוטלים את העולם לידיהם ומנהגים את העולם כפי זדונם וכפי טפשותם. מעתה היאך נותנים החכמים לעולם שיאבד על ידי השוטים והרשעים, אלא מתוך שהחכמים חכמים ומוסיפים חכמה, כל שנראה להם אתמול כחכמה שלימה רואים אותו היום שאינו חכמה ואינם עומדים על דעתם ואינם תוקעים עצמם לשום דבר מפני החכמה שמוליכה את החכמים ממעלה למעלה. לא כן הטפשים. כל דבר שנתנו בו עיניהם הרי הם מחזיקים בו ואינם מניחים ממנו, שאם יניחו ידיהם ממנו אין להם מה יעשו בעולם. (ש”י עגנון, שירה)

“Lying is an ugly vice, which an ancient paints in most shameful colors when he says that it is giving evidence of contempt for God, and at the same time of fear of men. It is not possible to represent more vividly the horror, the vileness, and the profligacy of it. For what can you imagine uglier than being a coward toward men and bold toward God? Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society. It is the only instrument by means of which our wills and thoughts communicate, it is the interpreter of our soul. If it fails us, we have no more hold on each other, no more knowledge of each other. If it deceives us, it breaks up all our relations and dissolves all the bonds of our society.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“The venerable senate of the Areopagus judged by night, for fear that the sight of the plaintiffs might corrupt their justice.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“Et à fin que les luges ne peussent estre destournez par quelque affection de la verité, ils cognoissoient des causes criminelles la nuict, & en tenebres.” (G. Bouchet, 1584, Les Sérées, v. II, Nevfiesme Seree, p. 134)

“It is very easy, upon accepted foundations, to build what you please; for according to the law and ordering of this beginning, the rest of the parts of the building are easily done, without contradictions. By this path we find our reason well founded, and we argue with great ease. For our masters occupy and win beforehand as much room in our belief as they need in order to conclude afterward whatever they wish, in the manner of the geometricians with their axioms; the consent and approval that we lend them giving them the wherewithal to drag us left or right, and to spin us around at their will. Whoever is believed in his presuppositions, he is our master and our God; he will plant his foundations so broad and easy that by them he will be able to raise us, if he wants, up to the clouds.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

From Herbert Simon, 1983, Reason in Human Affairs: “A useful, if outrageous, exercise for sharpening one’s thinking about the limited usefulness of reasoning, taken in isolation, is to attempt to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf analytically — as though preparing for a debate, The exercise is likely to be painful, but is revealing about how facts, values, and emotions interact in our thinking about human affairs. I pick this particular example because the reader’s critical faculties are unlikely, in this case, to be dulled by agreement with the views expressed.

“Most of us would take exception to many of Hitler’s ‘facts,’ especially his analysis of the causes of Europe’s economic difficulties, and most of all his allegations that Jews and Marxists (whom he also mistakenly found indistinguishable) were at the root of them. However, if we were to suspend disbelief for a moment and accept his ‘facts’ as true, much of the Nazi program would be quite consistent with goals of security for the German nation or even of welfare for the German people. Up to this point, the unacceptability of that program to us is not a matter of evil goals — no one would object to concern for the welfare of the German people — or of faulty reasoning from those goals, but rests on the unacceptability of the factual postulates that connect the goals to the program. From this viewpoint, we might decide that the remedy for Nazism was to combat its program by reason resting on better factual premises.

“But somehow that calm response does not seem to match the outrage that Mein Kampf produces in us. There must be something more to our rejection of its argument, and obviously there is, Its stated goals are, to put it mildly, incomplete. Statements of human goals usually distinguish between a ‘we’ for whom the goals are shaped and a ‘they’ whose welfare is not ‘our’ primary concern. Hitler’s ‘we’ was the German people — the definition of ‘we’ being again based on some dubious ‘facts’ about a genetic difference between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples. Leaving aside this fantasy of Nordic purity, most of us would still define ‘we’ differently from Hitler. Our ‘we’ might be Americans instead of Germans, or, if we had reached a twenty-first-century state of enlightenment, our ‘we’ might even be the human species. In either case, we would be involved in a genuine value conflict with Mein Kampf, a conflict not resolvable in any obvious way by improvements in either facts or reasoning. Our postulation of a ‘we’ — of the boundary of our concern for others — is a basic assumption about what is good and what is evil.

“Probably the greatest sense of outrage that Mein Kampf generates stems from the sharpness of the boundary Hitler draws between ‘we’ and ‘they.’ Not only does he give priority to ‘we,’ but he argues that any treatment of ‘they,’ however violent, is justifiable if it advances the goals of ‘we.’ Even if Hitler’s general goals and ‘facts’ were accepted, most of us would still object to the measures he proposes to inflict on ‘they’ in order to nurture the welfare of ‘we.’ If, in our system of values, we do not regard ‘they’ as being without rights, reason will disclose to us a conflict of values — a conflict between our value of helping ‘we’ and our general goal of not inflicting harm on ‘they.’ And so it is not its reasoning for which we must fault Mein Kampf, but its alleged facts and its outrageous values.

“There is another lesson to be learned from Mein Kampf. We cannot read many lines of it before detecting that Hitler’s reasoning is not cold reasoning but hot reasoning. We have long since learned that when a position is declaimed with passion and invective, there is special need to examine carefully both its premises and its inferences. We have learned this, but we do not always practice it, Regrettably, it is precisely when the passion and invective resonate with our own inner feelings that we forget the warning and become uncritical readers or listeners. Hitler was an effective rhetorician for Germans precisely because his passion and invectives resonated with beliefs and values already present in many German hearts. The heat of his rhetoric rendered his readers incapable of applying the rules of reason and evidence to his arguments. Nor was it only Germans who resonated to the facts and values he proclaimed, The latent anti-Semitism and overt anti-Communism of many Western statesmen made a number of his arguments plausible to them.

“And so we learned, by bitter experience and against our first quick judgments, that we could not dismiss Hitler as a madman, for there was method in his madness, His prose met standards of reason neither higher nor lower than we are accustomed to encountering in writing designed to persuade. Reason was not, could not have been, our principal shield against Nazism. Our principal shield was contrary factual beliefs and values.”

W. H. Auden on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition: “The normal consequence of having read a book with admiration and enjoyment is a desire that others should share one’s feelings. There are, however, if I can judge from myself, occasional exceptions to this rule. Every now and then, I come across a book which gives me the impression of having been especially written for me. In the case of a work of art, the author seems to have created a world for which I have been waiting all my life; in the case of a ‘think’ book, it seems to answer precisely those questions which I have been putting myself. My attitude toward such a book, therefore, is one of jealous possessiveness. I don’t want anybody else to read it; I want to keep it all to myself. Miss Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition belongs to this small and select class; the only other member which, like hers, is concerned with historical-political matters, is Rosenstock-Hussey’s Out of Revolution.” (In Arthur Krystal’s A Company of Readers)

Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years 1940–1944 (tr. David Ball): “I told them that this year’s work would have a still more serious meaning, that my job was to teach them France and French thought — that is, something which, as skeptical as I may be about history, seems to me as solid as the Alps or the Pyrenees; this solidity would be our guarantee and nothing and nobody could make France something different from what she was, and luckily her history could not be changed; I told them that Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Michelet, Hugo, and Renan were its guardians, and that consequently, according to the law of my profession and out of simple honesty and faithfulness to myself, to Europe, and my country, I would speak to them as I had always spoken. I told them victory would not have changed anything in my way of thinking, so defeat could not change it, either.”

“…when you resist the growth of an innovation that has come to introduce itself by violence, it is a dangerous obligation and a handicap to keep yourself in check and within the rules, in all matters and places, against those who are free as air, to whom everything is permissible that can advance their plan, who have neither law nor order except to follow their advantage.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)