Sublime

We point at the decline of civilization into illiteracy, and ourselves forget the art of letter-writing, or of reading a text from Jean Paul as it must have been read in his time. We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by

Most thought the government was spending far more than it actually was. That article, my friend said, showed him that there’s little value in asking people questions regarding matters they know nothing about, unless you’re trying to determine their level of knowledge. Because of that article, whenever someone proposes a poll as part of an article,

for what do Americans know about anything?

But that the slave was human and the servitude inhuman—that was, if anything, clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a progress; it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a triumph of science over superstition. It was 'the way the world

It seemed to him absurd that a man should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge. But anyone who does not understand that does not understand the French Revolution–nor, for that matter, the American

“Everybody in the gay community will be dead except two of these political dinosaurs debating over whether it’s politically correct to tell people to stop having anal sex.”

The vulgarisation of modern life has come from the governing class; from the highly educated class.