It is clear that international law must evolve, even if it will be difficult to find the new and appropriate notions that will allow it to. However, it is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are.
~ Jean-François Revel
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Everyone has the same God; only people differ.
~ Anton Chekhov
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There’s always a Mormon around when you don’t want one, trying your patience with unsolicited kindness.”
~ David Foster Wallace via The Atlantic
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The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.
~ Jean-François Revel
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Anyone who falls in love is searching for missing pieces of themselves.
~ Haruki Murakami
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Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
~ Janet Malcolm
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The success and originality of American integration stem precisely from the fact that immigrants’ descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers. In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation, confrontation, rejection, and hatred.
~ Jean-François Revel
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Punishing people for their words does not make the words vanish from memory. The unsayable is not unthinkable. Indeed, the punishment of the word may actually magnify the impact of the thought. Never mind abstract free-speech principles: Purely on pragmatic grounds, when a member of a community says something that bitterly divides the community, the way to a resolution is not to suppress the thought, but to argue it out.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Not all the arts of diplomacy are learned solely in its practice. There are other exercise yards.
~ Dean Acheson
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No well-run yacht basin is complete without at least two Estonians.
~ Ernest Hemmingway
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