Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.
We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.
We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
The responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity.
I mean, it’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don’t own it, that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.
Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.
I know the heart of life is good.
Consistency is necessary, but its not sufficient to make it to a level that breaks you out in front of everyone else.