We only become beasts — we become worse than beasts — when we torment others.
~ Iain Banks
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Author Archives: Seamas Anstruther
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By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
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Music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
― Walter Benjamin
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
~ Audre Lorde
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San Diego State University was founded on this day in 1897
San Diego State University was established on this day – March 13 – in 1897.
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Satirists are famously also moralists, and Michel Houellebecq is no exception. Indeed, he’s a religious writer, even though his scabrous novels usually scoff at established religion.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things.
~ John Ruskin
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Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
~ Franz Kafka
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