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“Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.”
― Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
― Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Cosmos
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Cosmos
“Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; in its precepts 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt'. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life: in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each man's feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow-creatures [...]. It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience;”
― On Liberty
― On Liberty
Adrian’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Adrian’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
89 books
|
4 friends
426 books
|
70 friends
442 books
|
11 friends
87 books
|
2 friends
11 books
|
27 friends
27 books
|
1 friend
84 books
|
42 friends
0 books
|
2 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Biography, Classics, Ebooks, Fiction, History, Memoir, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Science, and Science fiction
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