As much as any other institution—schools, libraries, churches—the public-health system has helped propagate the idea of a commons, often working against historical inertia to curb the excesses of American individualism. That work has always required energy and effort from the people. And so it has always been vulnerable, because that energy and effort could dissipate at any time.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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No love can survive muteness.
~ Milan Kundera
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When your local hospital and nursing home get loaded with debt, cut back on staffing and start charging more for worse patient outcomes, that’s financialization as tragedy. When airlines earn more by selling miles to credit card companies than by flying passengers, with consumers footing the hidden bill every time they swipe at the register, financialization has become farce.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.
~ Jim Collins
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Men famously think about Rome every day, and political commentators have been nervously comparing Rome’s fall to a potential American collapse since before America even had a Constitution.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.
~ Anton Chekhov
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Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
~ Richard Rorty
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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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To express what I feel I use the medium best suited to express that idea, which is also always the most economical one.
~ Emmanuel Radnitzky
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Governor Newsom, who has not changed his cellphone number since becoming mayor of San Francisco, in 2004, has nine thousand twenty-two personal contacts on his phone, and is in touch with a startling number of them as he tries to widen his view.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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