An Unenviable Situation

Saturday, December 20, 2003

Yesterday I spent the day supervising a crew of Mexican immigrants demolishing the interior of a small building. For the first time in 20 years I didn't pitch in and help. I felt their contempt, a contempt I'd always consciously avoided. This time I bought them coffee. I didn't think it would change anything, and I was right.

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"I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty."

George Santayana

Ernst Kantorowicz: “Looking at the stars, I feel my own futility.”

Erwin Panofsky: “All I feel is the futility of the stars.”

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Bernd Hüppauf

"I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all: It will not speak of me or others, Of love or youth,

or of anything else, For it was composed while I was asleep

Riding on horseback."

William IX of Aquitaine

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Richard Nixon

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Piero Sraffa

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George Kuchar

“Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology”

B.F. Skinner

"Mailer was a Left Conservative."

Norman Mailer

"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

John von Neumann

"Irony which is the glory of slaves."

Czeslaw Milosz

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John Mortimer

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Max Weber

"The American middle class committed two great crimes against American cities. First they left. Then they came back"

Michael Sorkin[?]

“You’re a leftist? What’s your trade”

Ken Graeber

"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."

Daniel Bell

"It is painful to note that we find similar errors in two opposed schools: the bourgeois school and the socialist school. 'Moralize! Moralize!' cry both with missionary fervor."

Charles Baudelaire

“Eventually, however, it became clear to me that academics and non-academics have very different approaches to ideas. Academics, though it sounds odd to say it, don’t take ideas seriously.”

Marfrks

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Bertolt Brecht

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Joseph de Maistre

"...the social sciences, an abominable discipline from every point of view"

Hannah Arendt

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Richard Lewontin

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Emmanuel Todd

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Rudyard Kipling

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Marshawn Lynch

"Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy."

Immanuel Kant

"The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny."

D.H. Lawrence

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Oswald Spengler

"You must overbend the material past the desired bend angle and allow it to return to the desired shape with the springback."

Art Hedrick

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Desiderius Erasmus