#rope

It’s not easy to be God. ↗

— Péter Zilahy

#coming-of-age #dark-humour #sacrifice #age

We learn the rope of life by untying its knots. ↗

— Jean Toomer

#learn #life #rope

As a Republican, I voted with President Clinton consistently in our efforts to bail out our European friends in Kosovo to stop genocide. I am proud of those votes. I am proud of President Clinton for that. ↗

— Gordon Smith

#bail #clinton #consistently #efforts #european

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she as extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity. ↗

— Lewis Hyde

#intellectual-property #art

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth. ↗

— Xun Zi

#big #big picture #clouded #everyone #fear

Madam: If you discover any more comets, can you not wait until they are announced by the proper authorities? ↗

— George Phillips Bond

#any #authorities #discover #madam #more

We always have a chance to ask, a chance to know, and a chance to change. If these chances are not used properly or merely ignored,then you won't have a second chance. ↗

— Sofia Ann

#change #properly #change

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. ↗

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#generalization #generalize #idea #means #property

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre suggested an association of all the states of Europe to maintain perpetual peace among themselves. Is this association practicable, and supposing that it were established, would it be likely to last? ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#education

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 poeples 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

#europe #european-civilization #islam #multiculturalism #pluralism