"The human mind is still something of a troglodyte. Expelled from one falling cavern, its first thought is to find another."

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“A historian should "go on reading until you can hear people talking. Then you will understand why things happened as they did.”

“A flight of perplexed unstable minds into the Confessional, into Spiritualism, into strange Eastern Cults.”

“To attend a place of worship, to abstain from spirits, to read a serious newspaper and put money in the savings bank, was in 1840 as good an ideal as could be set before a man. To pursue it gave him rank as a citizen, the promise of a vote, and a share in a solid civilization.”

“To play King Richard to somebody else's Wat Tyler has always been a Tory fancy.”

“Archives relating to G. M. Young”

“It was one of Lord Salisbury's paradoxes that only uncontentious legislation should be brought before Parliament: if it were contentious, then public opinion was not ripe for it.”

Resonant Thoughts

"It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian…"

— John Perry Barlow

Literature1947–2018

#mind

"Only the news concerning Black people made any impact at all on me. And it seemed that each year the news got worse. The first of the really bad news that i remember was Montgomery, Alabama. That was …"

— Assata Shakur

Social Activism1947–2025

#time

"“Architecture has been a domain of architects, a discipline presumably dominated by immaculately dressed bookish pedants that have a stream of thought well displaced from regular human thought.”- Rem …"

— Rem Koolhaas

Education1944

#books

"Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I …"

— Hunter S. Thompson

Literature1937–2005

#mind