Tag Archives: quote

We’re repeatedly told that computers’ memories are better than ours, that Facebook photos will ruin our future careers, that our youthful indiscretions will last for a thousand years in the mind of the network. And so we give up our … Continue reading →

So I couldn’t bring myself to believe that such a superb history had been left maimed and mutilated, and I laid the blame on malicious time, the devourer and demolisher of all things, which had either hidden or destroyed what … Continue reading →

There is nothing resembling a uniquely American worldview. America is too vast, and ultimately too unknowable, to give birth to one way of seeing things. -John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern p.89

The global free market is not the result of competition between different economic systems. Like the free market that was created in England in the mid-nineteenth century, it was established and maintained by political power. Unlike its English precursor, the … Continue reading →

A general is like a writer who sets out to write a certain play, a certain book, and then the book itself, with the unexpected potentialities which it reveals here, the impassable obstacles which it presents there, makes him deviate … Continue reading →

One of my cats died last year. Something, maybe a bone, punctured her lung. Pus built up in her lungs so that she couldn’t breathe. She suffered for four weeks and then died at the vet’s, a couple weeks after … Continue reading →

We’re all—especially those of us who are educated and have read a lot and have watched TV critically—in a very self-conscious and sort of worldly and sophisticated time, but also a time when we seem terribly afraid of other people’s … Continue reading →