Disdain fashionable things. Especially ideas.

Maxims and arrows Go Premium A fashionable idea, yesterday. A hearty collection of the JC’s pithiest adages. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Maxim Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Disdain fashionable things. Especially ideas. Fashionable ideas are the ones that, Q.E.D., did come down in the last shower. They lie there, sparkling like jewels in the fresh grass. Most of them will evaporate but one or two will by capillary action, soak into the soil and may nourish the roots of something profound. But — better to wait for that to germinate than drink it off the blades before it can, right?

Disdain beauty-pageant politics. Resist the urge to virtue-signal about simplistic politics. If a political angle seems ridiculously simple — so intuitively right that even a child could grasp its transparent eternal veracity, yet somehow it hasn’t taken hold in the world, that’s because it is ridiculous and childlike. “Ridiculous” means “deserving derision or mockery”.

“Imagine no possessions...” — wait a minute whose grand piano is that? And whose stately home? OH IT’S YOURS, JOHN LENNON?

Call bullshit.

See also

• Maxims for a happy life
• Imagine
• Call bullshit