Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you’re doing it, because learning is what matters.
~ William Deresiewicz
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Author Archives: Seamas Anstruther
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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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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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When asked what was the greatest political fact of modern times, Bismarck is reported to have responded, that it was “the inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English.”
~ George Louis Beer
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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
~ Milan Kundera
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If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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A living dog is better than a dead lion.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
~ William Deresiewicz
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College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
~ William Deresiewicz
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