Sublime

Loss of self. Of all of the forms of impoverishment that can be seen or felt in America, loss of self, or death in life, is surely the most devastating. Beginning with school, if not before, we are systematically stripped of imagination, creativity, heritage, dreams and personal uniqueness in order to style us into productive units for a mass, tech

Here is what to say: American democracy is built on the ethic of citizens caring about other citizens. Its moral mission is to protect and empower everyone equally by the provision of public resources. The Public is the foundation for the Private—for decent private lives and for private enterprise that works. No one makes it on his or her own witho

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law;

On peut lire ceci dans Walden : « Être philosophe, ce n’est pas seulement avoir des pensées philosophiques, ce n’est pas même fonder une école, c’est aimer assez la sagesse pour vivre selon ses arrêts, une vie de simplicité, d’indépendance, de générosité et de confiance. C’est résoudre quelques-uns des problèmes de la vie, non seulement en théorie,

After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;

You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.

He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of…

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