It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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No one disputes that Bannon is very smart. He sweeps in information quickly, has a file-cabinet memory, can keep multiple tabs open in his brain. It’s how he uses his brain that horrifies people—and I’m talking not just about Democrats, but about many of his former colleagues, who see in him a disordered, nefarious kind of brilliance.
~ Jennifer Senior via The Atlantic
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The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong.
~ John Steinbeck
We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators.
~ Erwin Schrödinger
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Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery.
~ Charles Dickens
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The gradual transformation of a rigidly organized hierarchic system into one where men could at least attempt to shape their own life, where man gained the opportunity of knowing and choosing between different forms of life, is closely associated with the growth of commerce.
~ Friedrich Hayek
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It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.
~ Wilfrid Sheed
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Exile has always served as a powerful engine for fiction. To find yourself displaced, whether self-imposed or inflicted by a state, is to be simultaneously inside and outside; you gain intimate proximity to your new society while still standing at a distance from it, seeing things real insiders can’t.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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The past is the luxury of proprietors.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
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