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“There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.” While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all. Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”
― Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
― Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
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“I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.”
― Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
― Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
“The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course— its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”
― Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
― Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
“In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve. The broad fidelity to this law helps make sense of what we observe all around: the powerful fighting to “change the world” in ways that essentially keep it the same, and “giving back” in ways that sustain an indefensible distribution of influence, resources, and tools.”
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Johnnies
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Open to anyone interested in reading and discussing the Great Books, this group was created especially for students, alumni and friends of St. John's ...more
Classics and the Western Canon
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This is a group to read and discuss those books generally referred to as “the classics” or “the Western canon.” Books which have shaped Western though ...more
The F-word
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— last activity Jan 16, 2026 02:23PM
This is our reading group for anybody who loves to read and identifies as a feminist. We'll be reading a variety of books that may fall into one of th ...more
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