Sic transit gloria mundi

Epitaph on Two Piping-Bullfinches of Lady Ossory's, Buried under a Rose-Bush in her Garden
by Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford (1783, pub. 1798)

All flesh is grass, and so are feathers too:
Finches must die, as well as I and you.
Beneath a damask rose, in good old age,
Here lies the tenant of a noble cage.
For forty moons he charmed his lady's ear,
And piped obedient oft as she drew near,
Though now stretched out upon a clay-cold bier.
But when the last shrill flagelot shall sound,
And raise all dickybirds from holy ground,
His little corpse again its wings shall plume,
And sing eternally the self-same tune,
From everlasting night to everlasting noon.

On the Other Bullfinch, Buried in the Same Place

Beneath the same bush rests his brother -
What serves for one, will serve for t'other.

There is more sea

Dante Gabriel Rosetti in The House of Life.

And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, -
Still, leagues beyond those leagues there is more sea.

Its hatred of silence

W.H. Auden in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. In an essay "Apologies to the Iroquois", page 69. On contacts between industrial and agricultural societies.

I find it immensely depressing that when unmechanized societies, whether Indians or Greek peasants, come into contact with ours, the one aspect of ours which none of them, but none, can resist is that which, to me, is the most intolerable: its hatred of silence - noise-makers have replaced liquor as our most potent agent of corruption.

Complexity horizon

John Allen Paulos in A Mathmetician Plays the Stock Market, page 194.

. . . the market's movements are therefore beyond the "complexity horizon" of human forecasters

They keep dropping in

W.H. Auden in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. In an essay "Apologies to the Iroquois", page 67. On the differences in the intellectual envrionments of the USA and UK.

Mr. Wilson is a bit of an anglophobe. Though, naturally, I do not share his feelings, I can understand them. It may take greater moral courage to become a Dandy in the United States than in England; nevertheless, I believe it is easier. British intellectual society is less boring, more intelligent and infinitely more charming than its American counterpart, which makes its collective influence much more dangerous to the individual - to resist seems rather piggy. Further, thanks to the physical size of this country, it is much easier here, if one wishes to be alone, to be left alone (in England, all one's intellectual relatives live within calling distance, and they keep dropping in).

The executioner

Joseph de Maistre:

All social order depends on one man, the executioner.

Democracy cannot thrive without a certain diet of truth

From Flight from Truth by Jean-Francois Revel.

Democracy cannot thrive without a certain diet of truth. It cannot survive if the degree of truth in current circulation falls below a minimal level. A democratic regime, founded on the free determination of important choices made by a majority, condemns itself to death if most of the citizens who have to choose between vairous options make their decisions in ignorance of reality, blinded by passions or misled by fleeting impressions.