Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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The current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Platform companies have themselves hired economists to help conceptualize and manage the economies they’ve created. Google, Airbnb, Uber and Amazon have aggressively recruited professors and researchers to help understand what, exactly, they have on their hands, and how to expand, regulate and exploit it.
~ John Herrman
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The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things.
~ John Ruskin
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The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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Good design is innovative.
~ Dieter Rams
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In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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The United States has cultivated a culture that prizes attention over empathy, fame over purpose, grievance over grace. The modern gunman doesn’t seek anonymity but immortality. He has learned that, in the land of viral violence, even murder guarantees an audience.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
~ Hannah Arendt
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Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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