It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
~ Frédéric Bastiat
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Category Archives: 1659 – Quote Unquote
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Force can overcome force, but a free society cannot long steel itself to dominate another people by sheer force.
~ Dean Acheson
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Both Franz Kafka and the Bible are inexhaustible sources of meaning because they overflow any box we build around them. They exist on a plane of Western consciousness so formative of ours today that they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.
~ Marcel Proust
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War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.
~ Ludwig von Mises
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Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being inferior.
~ Iain Banks
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Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.
~ Roger Scruton
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The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science. It was the past, but there were vaccines and Jim Crow was over and there was a modern sensibility without all of the pathologies of the internet.
~ Freddie deBoer
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As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
~ Audre Lorde
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Michel Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch. His mimicry of the inflated language of marketing, bureaucratic euphemism, and hypertechnical mumbo jumbo finds the exact midpoint between amusing and appalling.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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