Sublime

No writer can determine what may appeal to his imagination and it is simply philistine to arraign him for the things he happens to write about best.

The idea of the Citizen is that his individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in altering the State. The Germans are right in regarding the idea as dangerously revolutionary. Every Citizen is a revolution. That is, he destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own thought and conscience.

No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.

Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, describes the four pillars of postmodernism: 1.The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition; 2.Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not based on cultural

Such trends compelled me to stand my ground. I worked to expose Said’s Orientalism screed, noting that the first experts on the Middle East came from Germany and Hungary, neither of which ever colonized the region.

Montaigne’s essay on death

Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o

“What can be usefully postponed can be even more usefully abandoned” (Epictetus).

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.