"Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades."

Thomas Bailey Aldrich Literature See all quotes by Thomas Bailey Aldrich →

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“True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.”

“All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?”

“It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.”

“Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?”

“O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!”

“Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in wh…"

— Nick Land

Philosophy1962

#history

"What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent…"

— David Cameron

Politics1933–2012

#justice

"The whole world is in some ways better than it's ever been in the past. And, indeed, I think for many people the meaning of their lives really depends on that belief. If you strip out that belief in p…"

— John Gray (philosopher)

Philosophy1948

#history

"This was the Macintosh division, which was arguably the largest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California. We held that record for about 30 years until Google broke it recently."

— Guy Kawasaki

Psychology1954

#history