An Unenviable Situation

Monday, May 31, 2004

Jack Balkin on Formalism and High Politics.
I've posted on this a few times, but not for awhile. I'm not sure if I was bred on theories similar to Balkin's or constructed one out of the mess of political, literary, and legal debate overheard as a child in my parents' house. Either way, he's 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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George Kuchar

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B.F. Skinner

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Norman Mailer

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John von Neumann

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Czeslaw Milosz

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John Mortimer

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Max Weber

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Michael Sorkin[?]

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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

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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

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Immanuel Kant

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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