Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be made economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each other’s babies. It is simply throwing away a natural force and then paying for an artificial force; as if a man were to water a plant with a hose while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the
... See moreG. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
his description of humanity in his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) appears to be as somber as it was prophetic: “Narrow specialists without minds, pleasure seekers without heart; in their conceit, these nullities imagine they have climbed to a level of humanity never before attained.”
Tim Leberecht • The Business Romantic
He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.
Richard Powers • The Overstory: A Novel
He also liked Thoreau’s ideas about work, which aligned nicely with the way a lot of young people saw the world in the late 1960s. The goal was to do as little work as necessary, so that you could maximize the time available to do what you pleased.
Nate Blakeslee • American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West
It had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions, the average man, which goes by the name of democracy.
