Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
~ William Faulkner
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A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
~ Gertrude Stein
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
~ George Santayana
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Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
~ John Steinbeck
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A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
~ James Baldwin
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A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.
~ Diane Arbus
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Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.
~ Mark Twain
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