List of Albert J. Nock Quotes

The Position Of Modern Science, As Far As An Ignorant Man Of Letters Can Understand It, Seems Not A Step In Advance Of That Held By Huxley And Romanes In The Last Century.

If The Modern Spirit, Whatever That May Be, Is Disinclined Towards Taking The Lord's Word At Its Face Value (as I Hear Is The Case), We May Observe That Isaiah's Testimony To The Character Of The Masses Has Strong Collateral Support From Respectable Gentile Authority. Plato Lived Into The Administration Of Eubulus, When Athens Was At The Peak Of Its Jazz-and-paper Era, And He Speaks Of The Athenian Masses With All Isaiah's Fervency, Even Comparing Them To A Herd Of Ravenous Wild Beasts.

Someone Asked Me Years Ago If It Were True That I Disliked Jews, And I Replied That It Was Certainly True, Not At All Because They Are Jews, But Because They Are Folks, And I Don’t Like Folks.

Learning Has Always Been Made Much Of, But Forgetting Has Always Been Deprecated; Therefore Pedantry Has Pretty Well Established Itself Throughout The Modern World At The Expense Of Culture.

Perhaps The Prevalence Of Pedantry May Be Largely Accounted For By The Common Error Of Thinking That, Because Useful Knowledge Should Be Remembered, Any Kind Of Knowledge That Is At All Worth Learning Should Be Remembered Too.

As Sheer Casual Reading Matter, I Still Find The English Dictionary The Most Interesting Book In Our Language.

Above All Things The Mass-mind Is Most Bitterly Resentful Of Superiority. It Will Not Tolerate The Thought Of An Elite; And Under A Political System Of Universal Suffrage, The Mass-mind Is Enabled To Make Its Antipathies Prevail.

Diligent As One Must Be In Learning, One Must Be As Diligent In Forgetting; Otherwise The Process Is One Of Pedantry, Not Culture.

We Have Two Distinct Types Of Political Organization To Take Into Account; And Clearly, Too, When Their Origins Are Considered, It Is Impossible To Make Out That The One Is A Mere Perversion Of The Other. Therefore When We Include Both Types Under A General Term Like Government, We Get Into Logical Difficulties; Difficulties Of Which Most Writers On The Subject Have Been More Or Less Vaguely Aware, But Which, Until Within The Last Half-century, None Of Them Has Tried To Resolve.

Concerning Culture As A Process, One Would Say That It Means Learning A Great Many Things And Then Forgetting Them; And The Forgetting Is As Necessary As The Learning.

Useless Knowledge Can Be Made Directly Contributory To A Force Of Sound And Disinterested Public Opinion.

Organized Christianity Has Always Represented Immortality As A Sort Of Common Heritage; But I Never Could See Why Spiritual Life Should Not Be Conditioned On The Same Terms As All Life, I. E., Correspondence With Environment.