The value of land appreciates because of the work society does around it: the network effects of the companies operating around a piece of land, the public transportation that makes it accessible, and the nearby restaurants, coffeeshops, and access to nature that makes it desirable. Because the landowner didn’t do all that work, it’s fair for that value to be shared with the larger society that did.
~ Sam Altman
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If you don’t have the right things, you improvise, and the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they’re what you have.
~ Herta Müller
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Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him.
~ Franz Kafka
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You can’t say that civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
~ Will Rogers
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I started calling myself a genius to impress people, and I ended up being one.
~ Salvador Dali
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The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked upon.
~ Franz Kafka
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That’s how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don’t belong to you.
~ William Deresiewicz
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Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
~ Joseph Heller
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Abounding in minorities, the left is increasingly attentive to hierarchies of respect and vigilant about monitoring them. Abounding in intellectuals, it is increasingly — and mistakenly — inclined to view democracy as a search for truth rather than as a search for consensus; it is prone to cast those who disagree with it, no matter how numerous, as democracy’s enemies and even as authoritarians.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times
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