From the Journal of Belles Lettres, 1838, an anecdote about Henri François d’Aguesseau, three-time chancellor of France:

The chancellor, observing that his wife always delayed ten or twelve minutes before she came down to dinner, and being loth to lose so much precious time daily, commenced the composition of a work, which he prosecuted only whilst he was thus kept waiting. The result was, at the end of fifteen years, a book in three volumes quarto, which has gone through several editions, and is much esteemed.

D’Aguesseau seems to have been an industrious man — Voltaire called him “the most learned magistrate France ever possessed.”

This is dismaying. Suppose that men and women are equally sexist, and imagine a group that’s 80 percent men and 20 percent women. If 20 percent of people (represented as squares above) will make sexist comments to people of the opposite gender, we might expect that the women will receive four times as many sexist comments as the men. In fact they receive 16 times as many. Computer scientist Ian Gent explains:

With 20% women the gender ratio is 1:4. So there are 4 times as many men to make sexist remarks, so 4 times as many sexist remarks are made to women as to men. But there are 4 times fewer women to receive sexist remarks, so each individual woman is four times as likely to receive a given remark than an individual man is. These effects multiply, so in this example the mean number of sexist remarks per woman is 16 times the number per man. This holds in general, so with a gender ratio of 1:r, women will receive r² times as many sexist remarks as men.

Above, after 70 sexist remarks (arrows) are made at random to members of the opposite gender, the women have received a mean of 5.6 remarks each, the men only 0.35. Gent first described the effect in 2013; the mathematical model was devised by computer scientist Karen Petrie.

Why is there so little money in politics? If a government subsidy is worth, say, a billion dollars to certain stakeholders, then we might expect them to spend nearly that amount in lobbying and bribes to secure its success.

Generally, this doesn’t happen. The potential beneficiary of a policy will typically spend only a small fraction of its value to bring it about. Economist Gordon Tullock first pointed this out in 1980; the reasons for it are still debated.

We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your back. Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

— James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791

A “prayer to the local deities” offered by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus:

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.

“Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.”

“A few precepts to repeat whenever you are in need of comfort,” by Gabriel Hanotaux, French minister of foreign affairs from 1894 to 1895:

1. Anything can happen.
2. Everything is forgotten.
3. Every difficulty can be overcome.
4. No one understands anything.
5. If everyone knew what everyone said about everyone, no one would speak to anyone.

“Above all things, never be afraid. The enemy who forces you to retreat is himself afraid of you at that very moment.”

(Via André Maurois’ The Art of Living, 1939.)

We can’t control external events, but we can control our response to them. So, the Stoics taught, it’s wise to accept a fate that we can’t change. Zeno and Chrysippus summed this up in a parable:

When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.

Cleanthes expressed this in a prayer:

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,
To wherever your decrees have assigned me.
I follow readily, but if I choose not,
Wretched though I am, I must follow still.
Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.

Jeremy Bentham made a table of the springs of action, where every human desire was named in three parallel columns, according as men wish to praise it, to blame it, or to treat it neutrally. Thus we find in one column ‘gluttony,’ and opposite it, in the next column, ‘love of the pleasures of the social board.’ And again, we find in the column giving eulogistic names to impulses, ‘public spirit,’ and opposite to it, in the next column, we find ‘spite.’ I recommend anybody who wishes to think clearly on any ethical topic to imitate Bentham in this particular, and after accustoming himself to the fact that almost every word conveying blame has a synonym conveying praise, to acquire a habit of using words that convey neither praise nor blame.

— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, 1929

Bentham had published the table in 1817. “By habit,” he wrote, “wherever a man sees a name, he is led to figure to himself a corresponding object, of the reality of which the name is accepted by him, as it were of course, in the character of a certificate. From this delusion, endless is the confusion, the error, the dissension, the hostility, that has been derived.”