Orts #908

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
     -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter 6


The simplification of anything is always sensational.
     -- G. K. Chesterton, in an essay, Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity, in Varied Types

 

Killer Tulips!
https://bit.ly/2qPR4RR

an incidental fact from the article: "the Netherlands . . . produces more food for export than any other nation save the United States."

 

Plato considers Facebook:
https://nyti.ms/2Fn3LNU

"In a better world, Twitter might have been a digital billboard of ideas and conversation ennobling the public square. We’ve turned it into the open cesspool of the American mind. Facebook was supposed to serve as a platform for enhanced human interaction, not a tool for the lonely to burrow more deeply into their own isolation."
     -- (Bret Stephens, in the New York Times,  November 17, 2018)