#isa

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#admit #amidst #away #cannot #censorship

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#causes #disappear #else #identifiable #india

What we are witnessing now is a clash of civilisations, not just between states but within them. ↗

— Pim Fortuyn

#civilisations #clash #just #now #states

It's heartbreaking but we're trying to get over it. As disappointed as we were, I think that somehow you have to find a way to think that it happened for a reason. ↗

— Caroline Dhavernas

#find #get #happened #heartbreaking #i

War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war. ↗

— Anatole France

#abstention #bring #disappear #every #men

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation. ↗

— Jan Garbarek

#i #improvisation #jazz #keep #only

To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree. ↗

— Peter Gay

#boon #creature #disagree #just #kind

I have a superstition about saying too much about what I want to happen, just in case it all disappears, or someone else comes along and beats me to it. ↗

— Gil Gerard

#along #beats #case #comes #disappears

You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it. ↗

— Jonah Goldberg

#accused #argument #because #disagrees #free