To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
Quote, Unquote
The darkly elegant finding buried inside all of this is that Americans have somehow maintained their personal equanimity while watching the entire architecture of collective life crumble around them. People feel fine, and the system feels broken. These two facts coexist peacefully, year after year, survey after survey, administration after administration.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Red-flag laws, when balanced with due process, save lives. Universal background checks are not tyranny but common sense. Gun ownership should carry the weight of duty, not just the thrill of entitlement. The Second Amendment was written for a very specific reason. Responsibility must again become the companion of freedom.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Modern American life is absolutely steeped in video, which follows us, at every hour, from TV screens to smartphones to laptops, from movies to social media rants to workplace anti-harassment training modules. The soundtrack to most of it is some form of sync.
~ Ryan Francis Bradley via The New York Times Magazine
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It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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In its exclusion of links, minimization of text, and encouragement of gauzy filters, Instagram turns every smartphone into its own little Silver Pavilion, through which the user can both cultivate a world and blot out what they don’t wish to see.
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
~ H. L. Mencken
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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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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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