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22 books
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6 voters
Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word "yes" forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and
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“I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn’t even silly; it is the death of art.”
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“The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.”
― Speech on Conciliation with America
― Speech on Conciliation with America
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”
― The Brothers Karamazov
― The Brothers Karamazov
“However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.”
― Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
― Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
“The ideological fantasies of this movement [New Left of the 1960s] … were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades.… The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans … : liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of “revolution” without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such; …the cult of primitive societies … as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge.”
― Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
― Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
Ryan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ryan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
592 books
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25 friends
92 books
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90 friends
12 books
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34 friends
1,080 books
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128 friends
127 books
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55 friends
96 books
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64 friends
41 books
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67 friends
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21 friends
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