I started calling myself a genius to impress people, and I ended up being one.
~ Salvador Dali
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Category Archives: 0059 – Quote Unquote
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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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In modern office life, our efforts rarely generate an immediate reward. When we answer an e-mail or attend a meeting, we’re typically advancing, in fits and starts, long-term projects that may be weeks or months away from completion. The modern knowledge worker also tends to juggle many different objectives at the same time, moving rapidly back and forth between them throughout the day.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain?
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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God didn’t die, he was transformed into money.
~ Giorgio Agamben
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Higher education is facing a crisis of public trust. The simple fact of the matter is, fewer and fewer Americans believe that universities are committed to the pursuit of truth. Understanding why isn’t hard at a time when elite institutions make excuses for illiberal mobs. The perception that ideologues and fanatics are running the show on campus is, sadly, based in reality. The public sees it. Donors see it. Boards see it. Alumni see it.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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