I moved around my whole life, internationally, with my dad who was in international sales after World War II,
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Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
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The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now.
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These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
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Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.
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In economics, the majority is always wrong.
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In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.
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The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed in the name of God, Jesus, and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
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The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
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There has been a significant backsliding on human rights and we are seeing that principally in terms of increasing restrictions on what it's possible to say in the press -- certainly what it's possible to say on the Internet.
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People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
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In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
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Multitudes of people, drifting aimlessly to and fro without a set purpose, deny themselves such fulfillment of their capacities, and the satisfying happiness which attends it. They are not wicked, they are only shallow. They are not mean or vicious; they simply are empty -- shake them and they would rattle like gourds. They lack range, depth, and conviction. Without purpose their lives ultimately wander into the morass of dissatisfaction. As we harness our abilities to a steady purpose and undertake the long pull toward its accomplishment, rich compensations reward us. A sense of purpose simplifies life and therefore concentrates our abilities; and concentration adds power.
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Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization -- the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.
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There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
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He's come to die Or else to laugh, for hay is dried-up grass When you're alone."
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The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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There are so many little dying that it doesn't matter which of them is death.
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I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer....
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A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
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He's come to die Or else to laugh, for hay is dried-up grass When you're alone.'
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As the adjective is lost in the sentence, So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—...
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At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being? The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain. Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world.
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Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face In agonies of speech on speechless panes?...
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Armed conflicts often involve discrepancies of power between adversaries. Allowing those discrepancies to justify attacking civilians would create an immense loophole in the protections of international humanitarian law.
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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
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