The culture war is burning too hot for a class war to snuff it out anytime soon.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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Some writers work like sculptors: they produce something fully chiseled that could stand forever. Novelists tend to be like that. Rather than being a sculptor, I see myself as being a musician. After a performance, no matter how it goes, the musician’s task is to start practicing for the next one.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Research on apocalyptic belief suggests that mood is more predictive than party affiliation or income in how people respond to big risks. Political identity explains surprisingly little. What matters is whether you think capable humans are still in control, how close you feel to the edge, and whether some part of you suspects the crash might actually be an improvement.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Millions of artist create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
~ Marcel Duchamp
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When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
~ John Ruskin
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I’d probably rather live in a greedy country where people don’t share than in an envious country where people are stealing from each other.
~ David Sacks via The Atlantic
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An American academic who wants to move to Europe would have to accept more teaching and administrative work, lose tenure, and for the pleasure of all that, probably halve her pay. She would likely also suffer the resentment of European peers, who scoff at the idea that better paid Americans are now refugees. Trump threw a lot against US universities; they are holding up okay, and I think they will remain strong.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Unnecessary, false, dishonest products; these are the things that make me angry.
~ Dieter Rams
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New surveillance technologies tend to breed new countermeasures, which lead, in turn, to more sophisticated surveillance.
~ Ross Andersen via The Atlantic
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It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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