I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, and have given up their individuality.
~ William Butler Yeats
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Author Archives: Seamas Anstruther
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Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
~ Frédéric Bastiat
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Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.
~ Audre Lorde
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In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy.
~ John Lanchester
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All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
~ Albert Camus
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The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
~ Anton Chekhov
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Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion.
~ Umberto Eco
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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
~ Ernest Hemingway
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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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