#tis

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#badly #caught #enjoy #in my opinion #life

Like it or not, philosophy or intellectual activity in ancient China was distinguished from manual labor, and thus philosophical texts were not only political in nature (because they normally addressed the issue of good government and social order) but also “esoteric.” They were not meant to contribute to general education, but to be studied only by a small fraction of the population, i.e., by those who had access to learning and power. If we want to understand the Laozi historically, we have to accept this context and thus also the fact that, as a philosophical treatise, it did not attempt to be generally accessible. It was originally a text for the few—and it clearly shows. ↗

— Hans-Georg Moeller

#elitism #education

A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie. ↗

— Bill Condon

#character #movie #put #scientist #unlikely

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying. ↗

— Bill Condon

#dramatic #i #lives #people #rarely

Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals. ↗

— Jesse Helms

#become #big #big government #choice #conservatism

My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person. ↗

— Harry Connick, Jr.

#beethoven #her #i #i think #know

As soon as I got successful, the Scottish press started picking on me. It's something they reserve just for me. ↗

— Billy Connolly

#i #just #me #picking #press

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. ↗

— Cyril Connolly

#bring #function #imagination #meet #myth

And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anti-semitism #christmas #civilisation #daniel-pearl #detroit

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later. ↗

— Alistair Cooke

#american #british #embrace #enthusiasm #especially