Etienne de La Boetie Quotes
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
Quotes to Explore
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I was born and raised in Manhattan; I didn't realize that I, in all my androgyny, was a freak to the rest of this country.
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I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.
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In talking to you I feel very much more at ease than my colleagues who gave the speeches during the banquet.
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One of the biggest misconceptions that has been thrown out there is the fact that I started on Vine.
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Effective preaching starts with loving the people we're preaching to.
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It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
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Ultimately, I hypothesize that technology will one day be able to recreate a realistic representation of us as a result of the plethora of content we're creating converging with other advances in machine learning, robotics and large-scale data mining.
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I have a terrible fear of travel. Just before we go, I start to panic and tell my wife I don't want to go. It's ridiculous. But actually it's only when it's somewhere I've not been to before.
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Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
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Trivializing the Holocaust is the last thing I want to do.
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Religion is a matter of the heart. No physical inconvenience can warrant abandonment of one's own religion.
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Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
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Prior to 2001, hardly any company in North America or Europe would buy from India.
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The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
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Radicalization is very easy when you mock what people hold dear.
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Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
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Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.
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There is a triple layer of jargon when writing about climate change. You have the scientists, who are very cautious now because of the amount of climate denial. Then you have the U.N. jargon - I had to carry around a glossary of terms. It was like an alphabet soup.
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The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.
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Don't worry if people don't recognize your merits; worry that you may not recognize theirs.
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I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.
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America has never seen itself as a national state like all others, but rather as an experiment in human freedom and democracy.
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I look at the Samurai because they were the artists of their time. What I think struck me when I read Bushido is compassion. 'If there's no one there to help, go out and find someone to help.' That hit me, because I try to lead my life like that.
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It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
