Digital currencies are solutions looking for problems most everywhere in the Western world, but they have real value for people who suffer from state controls.
~ Dan Wang via his 2023 letter
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of the laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears, and in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.
~ Gustave Courbet
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Travel is usually a greater source of learning than the page.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter
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Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by the artist.
~ Gustave Courbet
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China’s intellectual tradition is to celebrate state power. It’s perhaps not much of an exaggeration to say that imperial China monopolized the entirety of intellectuals, through its administration of the imperial examination system, which induced the country’s most ambitious to spend their lives studying texts aimed at increasing the power of the state. So it’s unsurprising that China failed to develop much of a liberal tradition: court philosophers tend not to be enthusiastic advocates for constraints on the court.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter
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Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artist who have lived in it. I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can exist only of the representation of both real and existing things.
~ Gustave Courbet
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The mountains are still high, though the emperor may no longer be so far away.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter
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I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.’
~ Gustave Courbet
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Aging autocrats easily turn cranky. It’s especially bad since factional struggle is built into the Leninist system: Xi will never stop feeling paranoid even if he has surrounded himself with sycophants. So I think the party-state will continue to make unforced errors.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter
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I cannot teach my art, nor the art of any school whatever, since I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, I maintain that art is completely individual, and is, for each artist, nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition.
~ Gustave Courbet
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