#lt

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe. ↗

— Julia Louis-Dreyfus

#around #existential #feeling #guilt #guilty

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification. ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#adventure #america #civilization #desertion #emigration

The healthcare bill not only is a monstrosity in terms of growing the government and cutting out the private sector, the way it was passed was sleazy. Every old Washington trick was used to pass the healthcare bill. ↗

— Lindsey Graham

#cutting #every #government #growing #healthcare

You know, you're living in a society where if you say something that you might think may be OK, when it's more sensitive to that particular culture. You have to be very, very careful. ↗

— Stedman Graham

#culture #know #living #may #might

Proving yourself in a field where the casualty rate is so notoriously high is an ongoing challenge. ↗

— Richard E. Grant

#challenge #field #high #notoriously #ongoing

I can support co-ops if they want to do it as we've known co-ops in America for 150 years - where they serve the purposes of the consuming public, whether it's health care or whether it's co-ops as we know them in the Midwest, providing electricity or to sell supplies to farmer. ↗

— Chuck Grassley

#care #consuming #electricity #farmer #health

There never yet has been a great system sustained by force under which all the best faculties of men have not slowly withered. ↗

— Auberon Herbert

#best #faculties #force #great #men

Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present. ↗

— Asa Gray

#cause #confesses #difficulties #everything #find

I think I'm in the best place I've ever been in so many ways. I've just come out of five years of very difficult times for numerous reasons and yet at the same time it's lead to such growth. It's very exciting that way. ↗

— Erin Gray

#best #come #difficult #difficult times #ever

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ↗

— Talal Asad

#eurabia #europe #european #islam #modernity-tags-civilization