Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.
~ Eric Hoffer
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Category Archives: 2358 – Quote Unquote
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For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.
~ Cory Doctorow
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Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
~ Jonathan Haidt
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Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.
~ Mark Twain
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In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects.
~ Frédéric Bastiat
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During seasons of great pestilence, men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come.
~ Charles MacKay
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If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?
~ Desiderius Erasmus
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In a culture that has become obsessed with how our identities define us, far less time is spent considering how those identities just as often circumscribe. Just as emphasis on diversity can open minds, it can also harden preconceptions.
~ Pamela Paul via The New York Times
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