Thoughts & Quotes of Blupete

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FABIANISM

¶ Bertrand Russell, in disagreeing with Beatrice Webb who worshiped the state, observed that this "was the essence of Fabianism. It led both the Webbs and also Shaw into what I thought an undue tolerance of Mussolini and Hitler, and ultimately into a rather absurd adulation of the Soviet Government."
FACT FINDING

§ "[The fact finder is to] set down a continuance of the naked events and actions, without the motives or designs." (Francis Bacon)
FACTS

¶ "There are no facts, only interpretations." (From Nietzsche's Nachlass.) There are, of course facts, but Nietzsche was right to this degree, what we have to contend with is the interpretations of them.

¶ An old saying which circulates among courtroom lawyers, is: when you are weak on the facts, argue the law; when you are weak on the law, argue the facts.
FAITH

§ See blupete's commentary of -- December 1, 1997.
FAME

¶ "Fame is the thirst of youth." (Lord Byron)

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 18, 1998.
FAMILY

¶ "Yes, one's family are very trying: they are a living caricature of oneself, and have the same humiliating effect that is produced by the monkeys in the Zoo: one feels that here is the unvarnished truth at last." [Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1872-1914) (Boston: Little, Brown; 1967) at p. 250.]

¶ "To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections." (Edmund Burke)

¶ "A man that breeds a family without competent means of maintenance, encumbers other men with his children." (Edmund Burke)

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 31st, 1999.
FAREWELL

¶ "All farewells should be sudden." (Lord Byron)
FEAR

¶ "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear." (Edmund Burke)

¶ "In the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged." (Edmund Burke)

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 18, 1998.
FEELINGS

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 18, 1998.
FELONY

¶ In feudal times, a felony was an act on the part of a vassal which involved the forfeiture of his fee (his title to land, his home). A felony is a class of crime which comprises of those offences the penalty of which formerly included forfeiture of lands and goods. A felony is regarded by the law as a crime of a graver character than those called misdemeanours. In 1967, in England, distinctions between a felony and a misdemeanour were abolished. Here in Canada, serious crimes (felonies) are called "indictable offences" while "less than serious" crimes (misdemeanours) are called "summary conviction offences."
FEMINISM

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 31st, 1999.
FLIRTING

§ "So much alarm'd that she is quite alarming,
All Giggle, Blush half Pertness, and half Pout." (Lord Byron)

§ "Merely innocent flirtation, Not quite adultery, but adulteration." (Lord Byron)
FLOWERS

§ See blupete's commentary of -- December 7, 1997.
FOOD

¶ "I am no Quaker at my food. ... I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating; I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal." [Charles Lamb, as quoted by Alfred Ainger, in Charles Lamb (London: MacMillan, 1882) at pp. 107-8.]
FORCE

§ See blupete's essay -- "On War."
FORTUNE

§ "Fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman; if she be too much wooed, she is the farther off." (Francis Bacon)
FORTITUDE

¶ "... teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not fly from them like cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road." (Thomas Jefferson)
FRAUD

§ Fraud is a conscious misrepresentation on which another person relies, and as a result of his reliance suffers.

¶ "The best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes." (Thomas Hobbes)
FREE SPEECH

¶ "We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." (Mill)
FREEDOM

¶ "In the last resort, liberty is always a function of power." [Harold Laski, as quoted by Francis Hackett, On Judging Books (New York: Day, 1947).]

§ "Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind." (Lord Byron)

§ See blupete's essay -- "On Liberty."
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

¶ Freedom to express oneself in speech or in writing is limited. First off, most of us will restrain ourselves from saying hurtful things because, well, simply we were taught good manners, and besides being unkind can be unprofitable. We are, too, legally restrained from saying (slander) or writing (liable) something which will hurt another person's reputation; in such a case a civil action in defamation will lie. Other than this, the law has developed along the lines as expressed in the old school yard saying: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." So, why is it that the law has placed, traditionally and constitutionally, a high premium on freedom of expression. (The high premium, of course is that people are not legally restrained from saying or writing insensitive and intolerant things, no matter that a person or group of persons maybe insulted or outraged.) There is no law against one expressing his or her opinion, and it need not be free of prejudice and bias. The answer is that a primary social goal, the advancement of human knowledge is achieved and done so in a peaceful and productive manner.

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 21st, 2001.
FREEHOLD

¶ The term is used these days to describe the best title or interest in real property that a person can have. There are lesser interests such as a leasehold. Generally, when the rights over the land are given for a period the termination of which is not fixed or ascertained by a specified limit of time, the interest is a freehold interest.
FRIENDS

¶ "No one hates like him that once has been a friend." (Haliburton)

¶ "I have observed that few of those whom I have formerly known most intimate, continue on the same friendly footing, or combine the steadiness with the warmth of attachment. Some of them are dead, or gone to live at a distance, or pass one another in the street like strangers, or if they stop to speak, do it as coolly and try to cut one another as soon as possible. Times are changed; we cannot revive our old feelings; and we avoid the sight, and are uneasy in the presence of, those who remind us of our infirmity, and put us upon an effort at seeming cordiality which embarrasses ourselves ... if we meet again after an interval of absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too foolish, for us; and we wonder we did not find this out before. We are disconcerted and kept in a state of continual alarm by the wit of one, or tired to death of the dullness of another." (William Hazlitt, "On The Pleasure Of Hating.")
FRENCH & ENGLISH, COMPARISON

¶ "... the contrast between the frank sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true, the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in ordinary intercourse, than in England: but the general habit of the people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said." (John Stuart Mill, Autobiography.)
FRENCH REVOLUTION

¶ "I thought that ten thousand swords would have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her [Marie Antoinette] with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded." (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.)
FUNERAL

¶ "Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honour of the dead." (Rochefoucauld.)

¶ "Why is the hearse with scrutcheons blazon'd round,
And with the nodding plume of ostrich crown'd?
No: the dead know it not, nor profit gain;
It only proves the living vain."
Gay: Trivia.
FUTURE

¶ "The Future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions Past, to the actions that are Present." (Thomas Hobbes)

¶ "[The future is] a more fantastic creature of the brain than the other [the past], and the interest we take in it more shadowy and gratuitous ..." (William Hazlitt, "On The Past And Future.")

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