Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.
~ Richard Rorty
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Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay
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I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.
~ Jenny Odell
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It is the nature of men to be bound by the benefits they confer as much as by those they receive.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
~ Eric Hoffer
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Learning Object
via David Allen
[Twitter] @gtdguy
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My constant appeal to American liberals was to face the long, hard years and not to distract us with the offer of short cuts and easy solutions begotten by good will out of the angels of man’s better nature … The road to freedom and peace is a hard one.
~ Dean Acheson
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A world dominated by the technologies of industrial society is fundamentally more detrimental than beneficial to human happiness and survival.
~ Kirkpatrick Sale
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A document called “syllabus” persists, and is still distributed to prospective students at the start of each semester—but its function as a course plan has been minimized, if not entirely erased. First and foremost, it must satisfy a drove of bureaucratic needs, describing school policies, accreditation demands, regulatory matters, access to campus resources, health and safety guidelines, and more.
~ Ian Bogost via The Atlantic
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Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.
~ Friedrich Schiller
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The prophecies of Nostradamus consist of upwards of a thousand stanzas, each of four lines, and are to the full as obscure as the oracles of old. They take so great a latitude, both as to time and space, that they are almost sure to be fulfilled somewhere or other in the course of a few centuries.
~ Charles MacKay
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