The current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn’t. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still, you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.
~ Mickey Spillane
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A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
~ George Orwell
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
~ Milan Kundera
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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
~ T.S. Eliot
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
~ George Santayana
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Programs offering bachelor’s degrees are stuck in a predictable mold: Most classes are between three and four credit hours; each semester’s load is between 12 and 18 credit hours; each semester’s length is 15 weeks; each year is two semesters; four years makes a degree. In an economy and culture as dynamic as ours, this much standardization makes little sense.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.
~ Arthur Koestler
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There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem.
~ Eric Hoffer
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