Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.
~ Anton Chekhov
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Category Archives: 0747 – Quote Unquote
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
~ Milan Kundera
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Macho displays and transgressive memes mark a significant shift in how the federal government sees and promotes its mission—and sanctions state violence. It may be tempting to see this change as an organic or bottom-up phenomenon, as if federal agencies are appealing to Proud Boys to lure more ICE recruits. But the reality is that this transformation is the culmination of years of work by niche groups of conservative intellectuals who have long rejected America’s liberal traditions—and now dominate the halls of power.
~ Laura K. Field via The Atlantic
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
~ Milan Kundera
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Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
~ Marcel Proust
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It is a mistake to interpret too literally and sweepingly the poet’s admonition that things are not what they seem. Sometimes they are, and it is often essential to survival to know when they are and when they are not.
~ Dean Acheson
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There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanusy Die Lumpenamerikaner. The Ugly Ones.
~ David Foster Wallace
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A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
~ Norbert Wiener
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The Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution, but a managerial revolution. Today Russia is the nation which has, in its structural aspects, advanced furthest along the managerial road.
~ James Burnham
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We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power.
~ Derek Thompson
via How Donald Trump Won Everywhere
published by The Atlantic
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