Founded in the wake of the Cold War to meld Europe’s nation-states into an “ever closer union” and to form a continental government that would practice a new kind of politics, the European Union has wound up more outdated than the nation-states it was meant to supplant.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times
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Her experience seems to typify her carnally confused generation. Record numbers of young people are identifying as queer; traditional dictates around monogamy and abstinence need no longer hold as much sway; porn and dating apps offer a buffet of on-demand eroticism. Yet young people are, statistically, having less sex than their elders were at their age. Desiring and doing have never been so separate.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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When one has once accepted and absorbed evil, it no longer demands to be believed.
~ Franz Kafka
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The compulsive overachievement of today’s elite college students – the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can – is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn’t capable of handling the pressure.
~ William Deresiewicz
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A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
~ George Will
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To be sure, knowledge work does often require high levels of education and skill, but in recent years we’ve increasingly drowned the application of such talents in a deluge of distraction. We can blame this, in part, on the rise of low-friction digital communication tools like e-mail and chat. Office collaboration now takes place largely through a frenzy of back-and-forth, ad-hoc messaging, punctuated by meetings.The satisfactions of skilled labor are unavoidably diluted when you can only dedicate partial attention to your efforts.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending; many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London.
~ Charles Dickens
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I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one.
~ Gustave Courbet
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