American 🇺🇸 ✍🏻 Aphorisms

[BFGriffith]

Aphorisms from the United States of America 🇺🇸 (or the Americas more broadly)

Jack London 🇺🇸 12 January 1876 → 22 November 1916

• Novelist, Journalist

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❝I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin’s. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to‑morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa‑Truth he makes an appeal to Maya‑Lie."❞
 － Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore ⟦1914⟧

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Isaac Asmov 🇺🇸 2 January 1920 → 6 April 1992

• Novelist, Writer, professor of biochemistry

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❝The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.❞
 － Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations ⟦1988⟧

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❝But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro‑Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would‑be Fuhrers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certainly deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there.❞
 － John Thomas Flynn, “As We Go Marching” ⟦1944⟧