Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.
~ John le Carré
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To college-bound students, I would say this: The college campus is full of salesmen eager to get you to buy the deluxe model without so much as a test drive. But it’s your life and your mind, and—as of present writing—you have every right to think and speak and write for yourself. You’re needed out here.
~ Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic
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Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
~ John Ruskin
There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage.
~ Auguste Comte
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Lobbying, like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is a quintessentially American industry.
~ Franklin Foer via The Atlantic
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As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same.
~ Mark Lilla
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Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In every crisis, in every confrontation that has come my way, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
~ John le Carré
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In the broadest possible sense, “what’s wrong” with the modern American university is that although it still understands itself to operate under the model established by the 19th-century German university—which emphasized academic freedom, seminars, and laboratories as means of allowing students to discover the truth for themselves—it’s becoming a parody of that model. The professors are going to tell you what to think, and you’re going to backfill that “truth” with research of your own.
~ Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic
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Foreknowledge is power.
~ Auguste Comte
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