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He was in his '50s. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd wasted only a few years.

...for ineptitude is always synonymous with multitude, and nothing is fuller than an empty mind.

The desert is the size of your hunger, your curiosity,
The size of an absence you cannot fill.

In 1836, the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chadaev wrote an essay critical of the regime of Czar Nicholas I: “Contrary to all the laws of the human community,” he declared, at the height of the Russian imperial regime, “Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.”

Wow. Not much has changed in 200 years.

The combined effect of the deportations and the war on the demographics of the Baltic states was shocking: between 1939 and 1945, the Estonian population declined by 25 percent.

What a bloated mess of a book.

Left-wing journalism outlet the Intercept published a high-profile investigation in 2022 on how nearly all progressive interest groups in the U.S. had “more or less, effectively ceased to function” due to internal disputes.

I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

This fevered mess of world
is well done. Lean in and nuzzle
its exceptional need to be yours.

For virtue is a voluntary thing, subject to no dominion. Whatever is the result of compulsion and force cannot be virtue.

What strange creatures humans are, to dream so much and achieve so little.

...the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

A great mutual embrace
is always happening between the eternal
and what dies, between essence and accident.

None of you understand time. What does it matter which nations win which wars? Future wars will reverse all gains. God is on no one’s side,

just like the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,

When secular institutions succeed in increasing trust and cooperation in a society, they encroach on religion’s job and precipitate its decline.

Prosocial religions, with their Big Gods who watch, intervene, and demand hard-to-fake loyalty displays, facilitated the rise of cooperation in large groups of anonymous strangers. In turn, these expanding groups took their prosocial religious beliefs and practices with them, further ratcheting up large-scale cooperation in a runaway process of cultural evolution.

Heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

We’ll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.

Was he a monument to hope, or to insanity? He was a man grasping after an impossible solution. How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?

There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

I have so many friends who love these books and have recommended them to me time and again.

All Terry Pratchett books have been purchased.

Let's light this candle!

🪄

In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing?