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It was against Nazi Germany, prior to Pearl Harbor, that Americans developed the cold war concepts they would apply to the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.
“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”
― After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
― After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
“After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.”
― After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
― After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
“It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).”
― After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
― After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
“It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days; and now I changed both my sorrows and my joys; my very desires altered, my affections changed their gusts, and my delights were perfectly new from what they were at my first coming, or, indeed, for the two years past.”
― Robinson Crusoe
― Robinson Crusoe
“I had now brought my state of life to be much easier in itself than it was at first, and much easier to my mind, as well as to my body. I frequently sat down to meat with thankfulness, and admired the hand of God’s providence, which had thus spread my table in the wilderness. I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that He has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”
― Robinson Crusoe
― Robinson Crusoe
The Incomparable Book Club
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The Book Club of the podcast "The Incomparable." Jason Snell talks about geeky pop culture with a rotating panel of regular guests! http://www.theinco ...more
David’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at David’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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