"Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought."

Mark Kingwell Philosophy See all quotes by Mark Kingwell →

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“Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.”

“We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.”

“All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.”

“We are capitalism made flesh.”

“Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.”

“How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?”

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"The ball of snow when, as it rolls, it descends from the snowy mountains, increases in size as it falls."

— Leonardo da Vinci

Mathematics1452–1519

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"Samuel Adams had not inherited poverty nor had he, after all, exactly embraced it, but had as it were naturally drifted into it through indifference to worldly gain, the indifference which men of sing…"

— Carl L. Becker

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"I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free sp…"

— Liu Xiaobo

Philosophy1955–2017

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