Robert Cooper > Quotes

“A post-modern economy can have the result that everyone lives only for themselves, and not at all for the community – the decline of birth rates in the West is already evidence of this tendency. There is a risk too that the deconstruction of the state may spill over into the deconstruction of society. In political terms, an excess of transparency and an over-diffusion of power could lead to a state, and to an international order, in which nothing can be done because there is no central focus of power or responsibility. We may all drown in complexity.”
― Robert Cooper

“It costs nothing, he continued, to revere “one’s own sacred things … But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can’t revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try.”
― Robert Cooper, Around The World With Mark Twain

“The two are as often as not simultaneous … Look at the poor fool in ‘Lear’; look at Lamb, getting the quaintest, most spirit-moving effects with the tears just trembling on the verge of every jest; look at Thackeray and Dickens, and all the bright host who have gained niches in the gallery of the immortals. They have one thing always in their mind, no matter what parts they make their puppets play. Behind the broadest grins, the most exquisitely ludicrous situations, they know there is the grinning skull, and that all roads lead along the dusty road to death.”
― Robert Cooper, Around The World With Mark Twain