"Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence."

James Richardson Politics See all quotes by James Richardson →

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“First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.”

“Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.”

“Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.”

“Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?”

“The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.”

“It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it."

— Clive James

Literature1939–2019

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"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude either that there is no …"

— Thomas Jefferson

Politics

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"Reason, it is true, is DICTATOR in the Society of Mankind; from her there ought to lie no Appeal; But here we want a Pope in our Philosophy, to be the infallible Judge of what is or is not Reason."

— Daniel Defoe

Journalism1660–1731

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"In certain temperaments, intellectual skills and political sympathies have little or no connection. Frege’s anti-Semitism or Wittgenstein’s philo-Stalinism lacked significant leads to their philosophy…"

— Perry Anderson

Philosophy1938

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