Category: Intellectuals

Dostoevsky’s Vision

Forty years before, Dostoevsky  had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims….if Dostoevsky erred, it was on the side of understatement: from 1917 to 1959, socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!…

Today’s One-Liner (#317)

[I]n my work, the “bad” mimesis is always dominant, but the “good” one is of course even more important.  –Cynthia Haven, Conversations with Rene Girard:  Prophet of Envy, 131

Riveting

It’s good for me to be the citizen of a state in which there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, and eight and a half million messiahs….

Choose

We must decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or…

Today’s One-Liner (#281)

Within the Christian tradition more than a suspicion exists that the more intelligent we are,  the more we consider ourselves to be “intellectuals,” the more difficult it is to save our souls.  –James V. Schall,…

One-Pointed Attention

Make an orderly series of your different studies, so as to throw yourself into them completely. Let each task take entire hold of you, as if it were the only one. That was Napoleon’s secret;…

Have Your Pen Ready

Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, No Passion Spent  Essays 1978 — 1995

The Rules of Memorizing

St. Thomas proposes four rules: (1) To set in order what one wants to rememberbach; (2) to apply the mind deeply to it; (3) to think over it often; (4) when one wants to recollect…