Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
― Walter Benjamin
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We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.
~ Audre Lorde
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A curious feature of Franz Kafka’s prose is that, pared down though its lexicon may be, it resists translation. There’s a good reason for that. Dictionaries supply more definitions for basic words than for those of greater complexity because simpler ones are the roots of vast family trees of words; plain language signifies promiscuously.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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The veneration of physical beauty, the Instagramization of culture, is pagan to its roots. The overwhelming cascade of drugs, surgeries, and procedures intended to enhance one’s physical appearance—all precursors to “designer babies”—is a tribute to the externalization of our values.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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Living is despairing, and the dead they rot away.
~ Herta Müller
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From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
~ Franz Kafka
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed.
~ Umberto Eco
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Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.
~ Richard Rorty
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