Carlyle seemed to be a man who appreciated quiet. One of my basic takeaways was he really wanted people to shut up.

A collection of a handful of grand thoughts, some of them prophetic, some provocative, some wrong, expressed verbosely in the most beautiful polemic prose the English-speaking world has likely ever produced. I highly recommend reading it for that alone, but for those short on time the main points of

The greatest shit-post of all times. The Stump-Orator chapter alone is worth the price of admission.

Carlyle is massively overrated. He is best viewed as a shitposter, not a polemicist. He makes a fleetingly small number of arguments over the course of the pamphlets, and all of them are drawn by analogy. From a political and societal analysis perspective, I believe he fails to be a Schmitt/true aut

"If you could not get it spoken, if you could still constrain it into silence, so much the richer are you. Better keep your idea while you can: let it still circulate in your blood, and there fructify; inarticulately inciting you to good activities; giving to your whole spiritual life a ruddier heal

Lots of verbiage, relatively low on content. Some insights were OK. Hard to read, overall.