Chapbook
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for "
Books
Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be
History
In his book The Ruin of Kasch, Roberto Calasso argues that humanity lost an important outlet when we banned the ritual of sacrifice, because the craving to sacrifice now permeates life rather than being bounded and limited by the tradition of a ritual. The Aztecs killed a few to (as
History
Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton note how the development by the Greeks of libraries, as storehouses of the written word, changed the possibilities of knowledge from what they had been in a purely oral society: Every library comfortably contains writings and juxtaposes ideas that, if they were represented by
Politics
VauvenarguesSpinoza -- Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University, 2002), page 71.
Commerce
Financial maneuvering is a form of endeavor favorable to old men: The financial brain, unlike brains adept in various other areas—for example, mathematics, physics, chess, and, quite possibly, armed bank robbery—apparently deteriorates very little, if at all, with passage of time, even in the eighth and ninth decades
Philosophy
The following reflection on the unknowable vastness of human knowledge was written 75 years ago: SpenglerEduard Meyer So wrote Will Durant, looking back at the 1920s. When we think of the unknowable—the almost unfathomable—depths of what human individuals in the aggregate know; and then think of what is
History
For the 1916 presidential election, Republican leaders tried to find a candidate who could unite the party, after the Progressive split of 1912 had cost the GOP the presidency. The elders' first choice for a unifier was Elihu Root, who had won the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize and been
History
[…] [People emigrated to America] largely to get away—that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are
History
Newspapers have a much greater importance in America than they do in Europe. You must not conclude, however, that the press is more free in the New World than in the Old. With us it is the government that watches over and controls the newspapers; in the United States, the
Chapbook
[Gustave Flaubert's comic characters Bouvard and Pécuchet] discovered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal […] they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavor, and cull from their readings the most outstanding facts and
History
I find these quotes from Bernstein fascinating because popular history books so often mention money, but so rarely describe what that money was. [The eight-real "Spanish dollar"], which flooded the European currency markets in the sixteenth century, was approximately the same size and weight as the Bohemian