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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The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
~ Will Rogers
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The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad!
~ Salvador Dali
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Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.
~ Jenny Odell
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Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth.
~ William Deresiewicz
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When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.
~ Timothy Snyder
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It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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When asked what was the greatest political fact of modern times, Bismarck is reported to have responded, that it was “the inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English.”
~ George Louis Beer
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