Status Updates From King Leopold's Ghostwriter:...

The more I live the more I find I am reduced to understanding nothing, while others find I am comprehensible ... the first proposition I would make would be a revision of the language and an edition of a dictionary in which the meaning of certain words would be clearly defined - such words as peace and war; caresses and snubs; abstention and neutrality - complete the list if you like.

We have opened on a period in the world's history where men have begun to think who never used to think, i.e.. whose predecessors never thought as they do. They have reached a certain stage in the process, an imperfect one, and they must be hurried on to a more perfect stage.

'There is no cement for the future,' he argued, 'but self-interest and the problem is to substitute a healthy for a morbid self-interest.'

Henry Cavendish, he pointed out, had first understood the use of steam as an agent, but his name would not be heard 'once in a thousand times' compared to James Watt, who had applied the discovery to the steam engine. #LLMs

How much there is to think of at present if one looks for a moment at the great social problems involved in the fermentation of ideas ... You say that the civilization of the age is false. Will it soon be otherwise? Is not this part of the trial of this world?

As is paradoxically the case for conservatives, Twiss understood that continuity with the past demanded innovation, partly because of the necessity of inventing the past, but also because, invented or not, the volatility of the present and future changed the meaning of the past. He perceived himself to be a shaper of public opinion - that most potent of social forces, according to nineteenth-century accounts.