Chuck Klosterman Quotes
Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
Quotes to Explore
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The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.
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All performers get on stage because they need to feel love from an audience. I might appear confident, but those three seconds before I get out there, I'm a mess. But I have to take the risk; otherwise, I'd be miserable and would feel like I wasn't seeing through my personal destiny.
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You can't win if you don't play as a unit.
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In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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The idea was never for me to be a career bureaucrat or career technocrat; it was more about where I could implement ideas and reform programs.
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When I first got Yves Saint Laurent Couture, I didn't know how to take off a cape. I would ask Katoucha and Dalma - the real divas of the runway - 'Can you show me?' I've never been afraid to ask for help.
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The men and women of my generation are heirs to that great collective success which has been admired worldwide and of which we are so proud. It is now up to us to pass it on to the coming generations.
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When I got '227' and broke out from the rest of the cast, I became a workaholic, and I was very lonely.
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Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
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No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
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I was very lucky: I started acting in this highly subsidized German theater world, so there was not so much job insecurity. We had great working conditions, long rehearsal times, well paid.
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I am not an oligarch. I am a servant and I try to align my interests and those of my investors.
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Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
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I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.
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History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.
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Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
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I have my hopes, & very distinct ones, too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations: in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of the brain (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world).
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δοκεῖ δὲ αὐτῶι τάδε· ἀρχὰς εἶναι τῶν ὅλων ἀτόμους καὶ κενόν, τὰ δ'ἀλλα πάντα νενομίσθαι δοξάζεσθαι. (Diogenes Laërtius, Democritus, Vol. IX, 44)
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One of the things I did to make myself feel better is that I kicked up my running even more. I knew that I had to stay active, that I had to keep living as if my life was actually going to unfold naturally because when you stop, when you freeze, and you think about it, that's when the demons come and can drag you down.
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When a man is trying to sell you something, don't imagine that he is polite all the time.
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I dated a guy who played bad guys in movies all the time, and I think he was just a bad guy.
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Democracy, as has been said of Christianity, has never really been tried.
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Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
