“Some there are who are nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.”

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

JPod (2006)

Source: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980), p. 273

The Art of Persuasion
Context: Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind.

J. Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006)

XV. Why we give worship to the Gods when they need nothing.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: The divine itself is without needs, and the worship is paid for our own benefit. The providence of the Gods reaches everywhere and needs only some congruity for its reception. All congruity comes about by representation and likeness; for which reason the temples are made in representation of heaven, the altar of earth, the images of life (that is why they are made like living things), the prayers of the element of though, the mystic letters of the unspeakable celestial forces, the herbs and stones of matter, and the sacrificial animals of the irrational life in us.
From all these things the Gods gain nothing; what gain could there be to God? It is we who gain some communion with them.

Source: Chopin's Letters

In p. 61
The Long March: Profile of Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar