If you think, you might not act, and if you don’t act, how can you be an activist?
Apr 132021
Apr 122021
Your friends will generally put up with whatever hideous thing you say to them, as long as it isn’t true.
Apr 092021
A regular reviewer, whose fodder must by its nature be mostly mediocre or worse, can discharge his responsibilities to his readers only by continual pans, often of his friends and acquaintances; and this is more than human nature can bear.
Apr 082021
Revolutions are staffed by those who expect to gain from the coming order, but led by those who expect to suffer, whose negligence of personal considerations betokens their righteousness, and whose zeal is commensurate with their expectation.
Apr 072021
Humans always segregate — on their most observable characteristics, when left to themselves; when interfered with, on characteristics less observable.
Apr 062021
Great geniuses, Emerson said, have the shortest biographies. They do not: but for most of us our personal history is all that we are and for them it is next to nothing.
Apr 052021
Aesthetics trumps not just politics but ethics.
Apr 022021
To prefer the strange to the familiar, the far to the near, is in an adolescent a pretentious and mildly endearing tic; in an adult, a disease.
Apr 012021
America Pays for Everything: A Brief History of the 20th Century
Mar 312021
Behind every man who believes human nature can be remade at will stands a volunteer for the job.