Levi Carpenter > Levi's Quotes

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.”
― Francis August Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“Remember, the enemy's gate is down.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“[...]the Ideal shames us all. Thus we fear it, resent it--even hate it[...]What are we to do about that? Abandon all ideals of beauty, health, brilliance and strength? That's not a good solution.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition in life, and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

“In such societies [in which the state has preceded the nation], the political process is about domination, not alternation in office, which takes place, if at all, by coups rather than by constitutional procedures. The concept of a loyal opposition--the essence of modern democracy--rarely prevails[...]Western-style democracy [is unique in that it] presupposes a consensus on values that sets limits to partisanship.”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

“While years of education are often used as a rough proxy for human capital in general, not only is much human capital gained outside of educational institutions,[...]some education even produces negative human capital, in the form of attitudes, expectations, and aversions that negatively impact the economy.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“Christian mechanists accept evolution as a limited scientific theory, but they reject any extension of evolution into a full-blown philosophy--whether materialistic reductionism or romantic progressionism.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Charles B. Thaxton

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”
― William Butler Yeats

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.”
― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, 'If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.' The Christian replies, 'Don't talk damned nonsense.”
― C.S. Lewis

“[...] we are--/ One equal temper of heroic hearts,/ Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It's not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It's that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli--repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive--that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day