Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.
~ Roger Scruton
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Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became.
~ Franz Kafka
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Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.
― Walter Benjamin
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The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science. It was the past, but there were vaccines and Jim Crow was over and there was a modern sensibility without all of the pathologies of the internet.
~ Freddie deBoer
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As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
~ Audre Lorde
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Michel Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch. His mimicry of the inflated language of marketing, bureaucratic euphemism, and hypertechnical mumbo jumbo finds the exact midpoint between amusing and appalling.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
~ Franz Kafka
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