We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
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The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
The wise man sometimes flees from society from fear of being
bored.
The wise man sometimes flees from society from fear of being
bored.
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because read more
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that read more
While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, and ordered read more
The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate.
I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at read more
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to read more
The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be overestimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages.
