Today’s One-Liner (#86)

I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson

Today’s One-Liner (#85)

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done:  and there is no new thing under the sun. –Koheleth, 1:9, King James…

Russian Reflections on Kindness

1. When nineteenth-­century novelists exposed the hy­poc­risy of cruel ­people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hy­poc­risy is the…