Taking offense has become America’s national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.
~ George Will
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The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith
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The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
~ William Faulkner
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The most notable change of these tumultuous years, the ability to spend more time working from home, hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still wrong, above and beyond the usual challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired. What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
~ Gertrude Stein
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This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.
~ T.S. Eliot
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To swerve from the expected course so often is to become inevitably fascinated by what Philip Roth once described as the “counterlife,” the alternative version of existence, where what ifs are fully rendered in the imagination.
~ Franklin Foer via The Atlantic
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At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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Panic at the thought of doing a thing is a challenge to do it.
~ Henry S. Haskins
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