#cs

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own. ↗

— Lukas Foss

#basics #down #his #how #i

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson’s shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it’s nothing unusual—her mother did the same. ↗

— Harper Lee

#attitude

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles. ↗

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

#calamity #characteristics #courage #faces #grow

The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution. ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#characteristics #evolution #humans #inconsistent #mental

What's troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process. ↗

— Barney Frank

#delay #ethics #mr #process #republicans

Well, a lot of politics is communicating with people, and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also, being a comedian, you're under pressure. ↗

— Al Franken

#been #being #comedian #comedy #communicating

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is. ↗

— Rose Wilder Lane

#ethics #freedom #individual-rights #ownership #philosophy

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. ↗

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#liberal #politics #change

Politics is the only field in which the more experience you have, the worse you get. ↗

— Kinky Friedman

#field #get #more #only #politics

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #morality #freedom