Michael > Recent Status Updates

I say that ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall. It's like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same. Can you imagine a force in the universe greater than this?

"Talent is a kind of intelligence" 338

"the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there"

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

[N]o one of intelligence resents the inevitable.

The absence of a single familiar reference point can be utterly unnerving even to the coolest and clearest of minds.

"He had no wish to face whatever lurked in the unknown darkness, just beyond the little circle of light cast by the lamp of science."

Few artists thrive in solitude, and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

The world's now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason's obvious. There's nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. . . . every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? . . . people are becoming passive sponges -- absorbing but never creating.

No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

American education rituals especial efficient at task segregating youth of superior intellect removed from youth gifted superior physical prowess.