Europe is different. Europeans are mostly not aware that they have been enlisted in a project that has as its end point the extinction of France, Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe’s historic nations as meaningful political units. Brussels has been able to win assent to its project only by concealing its nature. Europe’s younger generation appears to have seen through the dissembling. We are only at the beginning of the consequences.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times
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The problem with overstuffed to-do lists isn’t just the total time required to execute their contents, but the fact that each new commitment generates its own ongoing administrative demands—emails, chats, check-in calls, “quick” meetings. That’s the overhead tax. Before long, knowledge workers find themselves spending the bulk of their time talking about work instead of actually doing it.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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Politics is not an exact science.
~ Otto von Bismarck
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The liberal arts inarguably make this world a better place. More students should be intellectually curious about history, literature, and ethics. But technical training and acquiring credentials for the job market have a place as well. There’s no reason trade schools need to fight the liberal arts in a zero-sum game. We need to think through how we create more and better of both opportunities.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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To govern men, you must either excel them in their accomplishments, or despise them.
~ Benjamin Disraeli
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For we carry our fate with us — and it carries us.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result. They centered the self. The revolutionary contribution of monotheism was its insistence that the principal concern of God is, instead, how people treat one another.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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