Today’s One-Liner (#65)
I want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam. –Oriana Fallaci,…
Category: Intellectuals
Recent Reading
The job of an intellectual is to listen to the history that is being made all around you and to respond in new ways by re-assessing your previous beliefs. This is what the founding generation…
Today’s One-Liner (#61)
It is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. –Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Today’s One-Liner (#19)
Whenever people really believe in some truth larger than the academic world, they do not dedicate themselves to the pursuit of academic success with as much ferocity as the people who believe in absolutely nothing. …
Today’s One-Liner (#11)
Method of investigation— as soon as one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sense the contrary is true. –Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Gratitude/2
For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…
The Chutzpah!
[Thomas] Sowell’s habit of challenging liberal orthodoxies that are held dear by most of his fellow intellectuals and the mainstream media has led to a good deal of criticism over the decades. This book explores…
Intellectual Superiority Complex
Ivan Karamazov has lost his faith precisely because he has elevated himself above the people. In this case, “the people” are not necessarily peasants, but are what Ivan, a modern intellectual, is not: human beings…
Who of Us Born Here Could Say This?
I loved the Constitution and could recite many of its provisions from memory. –Raul Hilberg, born in Austria, author of The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian
Sharing Her Wealth
[Simone Weil] continued giving her comrades her lucid and sad reflections, completely free of the blur of opinion, clear of the complacency of illusion, and untouched by the concerns of personal ambition. –Gabriella Fiori, Simone Weil:…