Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.
~ Friedrich Hayek
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I just hope that one day – preferably when we’re both blind drunk
– we can talk about it.
~ J.D. Salinger
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Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.
~ John le Carré
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Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith
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The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. It’s more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood, and this is a thing that even God — who knows all that can be known — seems powerless to change.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.
~ William Faulkner
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Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.
~ Jerry Useem via The Atlantic
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
~ George Santayana
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