A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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Perspective begins at a young age. Toddlers first begin using words such as me and mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves as separate from the outside world. Shortly thereafter, conscious exploration and discovery begins.
~ Alan Lightman via The Atlantic
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What the Novo Nordisk news made me appreciate was that American companies are comprehensively outworking their European counterparts in biotech in addition to software and finance. Europe is losing the two-front battle against the Chinese on manufacturing and the Americans on services.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.
~ H. L. Mencken
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The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk.
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic
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We remember the pandemic as a boiling point in the culture wars. The continuous battles over lockdowns, masking, police violence, expertise, conspiracy theories, and the outcome of the 2020 election have never really subsided. But the pandemic also exposed the grotesque unfairness of our economy and society in deeply personal ways, cutting across the red-blue divide.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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At the time, the prevailing wisdom held that attempting to vivisect the models was tantamount to the haruspicy of the ancient Etruscans, who thought they could divine the future by inspecting animal entrails.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Critical philosophy implies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins.
~ György Lukács
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