Never do any enemy a small injury for they are like a snake which is half beaten and it will strike back the first chance it gets.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Never do any enemy a small injury for they are like a snake which is half beaten and it will strike back the first chance it gets.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
~ Erwin Schrödinger
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A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes the system likely to oscillate.
~ Donella Meadows
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Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.
~ John le Carré
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A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better.
~ Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic
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Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
~ John Ruskin
The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.
~ Lewis Mumford
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In the post-war period higher education played a modest role in innovation. Businesses had more responsibility for achieving scientific breakthroughs: in America during the 1950s they spent four times as much on research as universities.
~ via The Economist
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Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality.
~ Auguste Comte
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