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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Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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