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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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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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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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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In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.
~ Hannah Arendt
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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 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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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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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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