It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
Quote, Unquote
The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Quote, Unquote
The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Quote, Unquote
It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street. So long as the tech world is talking about the Machine God and the Antichrist, so long as it declines to read more broadly, so long as it is mostly inward looking, it will continue to alienate big parts of the world.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Quote, Unquote
The advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. Affluent, well-educated parents marry each other and confer their advantages on their kids, who then go to fancy colleges and marry people like themselves. As in all caste societies, the segregation benefits the segregators. And as in all caste societies, the inequalities involve inequalities not just of wealth but of status and respect.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Quote, Unquote
The internet of the 1990s was a perfect canvas for alarmism: hard to define, easy to misunderstand, growing rapidly but not yet vital or even familiar to those most inclined to worry about it.
~ John Herrman
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Quote, Unquote
If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it.
~ Marcel Duchamp
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Programs offering bachelor’s degrees are stuck in a predictable mold: Most classes are between three and four credit hours; each semester’s load is between 12 and 18 credit hours; each semester’s length is 15 weeks; each year is two semesters; four years makes a degree. In an economy and culture as dynamic as ours, this much standardization makes little sense.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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Quote, Unquote
While I feel apprehensive about the US, I am much more gloomy about Europe. I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Quote, Unquote
In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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