Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
Stephen Vizinczey
Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you
people live thought desire thoughts feelings desires dictatorship dictators
Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.
education learning stupidity strange cure
consistency genius virtue philosopher trains
As both capitalist and communist states -- not to mention the technological world --have evolved under the illusion that men purposefully built them, ideological optimism seeps into every niche of our lives. It is made worse by mass culture which feeds our
culture men illusion world optimism niche lives made worse
Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
character author book authors bad vain boring books thing
There are millions of people who think that having heard about something is the same as knowing it, and their notion of culture is a mixture of elegant lifestyle and big names.
culture people names knowing lifestyle big
When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.
greatness tragedy eyes close
We live under the tyranny of various professional groups, and all the 'influence' we could bring to bear on the running of schools, trains or power stations isn't sufficient to move a feather.
power live tyranny running trains schools bear
Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.
imagination book safety place state
I submit that anyone who is trying to explain one thing in terms of something else has nothing important to say.
important thing
We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang on to the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It´s less painful to think 'I'm shallow', 'She's self centred', 'We couldn't communicate', 'It was all just physical', than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling -- that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're untrue even to life.
life meaning romance
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
education stupidity
We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.
culture people
The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.
tests virtues life imagination character
The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.
race truth
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