It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.
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Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.
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Insight into the two selves within a man clears up many confusions and contradictions. It was our understanding that preceded our victory.
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Through the fact that he defines himself as a religious being, man is first of all his own prophet and only then he places himself in the pluralistic assembly of the prophets that he identifies to the ambitions, aspirations, hopes, imprudent acts, confusions, failures or disillusions of his own life.
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