/pragmatica/
slouching towards Bethnal Green
Posts I Like
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“[A]usterity-loving pundits and policy makers really are like medieval doctors who believed in treating illness by bleeding their patients, making the...”
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“Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of...”
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“[I]t is not particularly difficuly to move towards a solution the problem raised by Hume, which Kant believed he had solved. The belief in the...”
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Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
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“
I am twenty-nine, pocket flap folded
”
And I am smiling I am looking out at a world that
I significantly re-created from inside
Out of...
And, on the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in all countries and times except our own, as having spent their life in blind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations of men were lost and wrong, only that this present little section of a generation might be saved and right. They all marched forward there, all generations since the beginning of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we might march over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
