In our civilized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lies with the people; I must go to them directly. I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian.
~ Gustave Courbet
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I don’t think we do a service to anyone to pretend that technology does not eliminate some jobs. Some jobs it just makes much better. But the arc of this has been that every technological revolution eliminates one class, one sets of jobs, and we find new ones on the other side that are hard to imagine from where we sit today.
~ Sam Altman
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The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse.
~ Herta Müller
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Throughout most of history, religious institutions were able to impose pro-fertility norms. But the causal relationship is reciprocal and the dominant direction can be reversed: if pro-fertility norms come to be seen as outmoded and repressive, their rejection also brings rejection of religion.
~ Ronald Inglehart
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Most colleges today underinvest in student advising and mentoring, and in intensive internships and career development. Our standard testing practices encourage mindless cramming and dumping, rather than critical engagement. All students would benefit from more frequent, low-stakes, real-time, individualized assessments.
~ Ben Sasse via 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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You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he’d never be another Shakespeare.
~ William Deresiewicz
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The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
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The most notable change of these tumultuous years, the ability to spend more time working from home, hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still wrong, above and beyond the usual challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired. What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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