Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay
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Franz Kafka’s stories are Jewish the way the Old Testament is Jewish. That is, it’s also Christian, and it speaks even more generally to the human condition, and to a great deal besides that.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.
~ Jenny Odell
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One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.
~ Clark Kerr
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Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.
~ Milan Kundera
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If Robert Putnam felt the first raindrops of an antisocial revolution in America, the downpour is fully here, and we’re all getting washed away in the flood. From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.
~ Derek Thompson via The Atlantic
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The over-bearing insolence of ignorant men, who had arisen to sudden wealth by successful gambling, made men of true gentility of mind and manners blush that gold should have power to raise the unworthy in the scale of society.
~ Charles MacKay
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Campus Life at
SUNY Buffalo
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The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots.
~ Anton Chekhov
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