“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong.”
- Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Vintage: New York, 1998), 35.
"‘I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.’ But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creātus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’"
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Bay Back Books: New York, 1996), 12.
"The insights gained and garnered by the mind in its wanderings among basic concepts are benefits that theory can provide. Theory cannot equip the mind with formulas for solving problems, nor can it mark the narrow path on which the sole solution is supposed to lie by plating a hedge of principles on either side. But it can give the mind insight into the great mass of phenomena and of their relationships, then leave it free to rise into the higher realms of action. There the mind can use its innate talents to capacity, combining them all so as to seize on what is right and true as though this were a single idea formed by their concentrated pressure—as though it were a response to the immediate challenge rather than a product of thought."
Carl Von Clausewitz, On War
"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."
Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pg. 87.
"The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?"
毛泽东: Mao Zedong
“Now then, my lad, you’re still young, and as time goes on you’ll come to adopt opinions diametrically opposed to those you hold now. Why not wait till later on to make up your mind about these important matters? The most important of all, however lightly you take it at the moment, is to get the right ideas about the gods and so live a good life:—otherwise you’ll live a bad one. In this connection, I want first to make a crucial and irrefutable point. It’s this: you’re not unique. Neither you nor your friends are the first to have held this opinion about the gods. It’s an illness from which the world is never free, though the number of sufferers varies from time to time. I’ve met a great many of them, and let me assure you that none of them who have been convinced early in life that gods do not exist have ever retained that belief into old age.”
"Pleasure is indeed a proper criterion in the arts, but not the pleasure experienced by anybody and everybody. The productions of the Muse are at their finest when they delight men of high calibre and adequate education—but particularly if they succeed in pleasing the single individual whose education and moral standards reach heights attained by no one else. This is the reason why we maintain that judges in these matters need high moral standards: they have to possess not only a discerning taste, but courage too. A judge won’t be doing his job properly if he reaches his verdict by listening to the audience and lets himself be thrown off balance by the yelling of the mob and his own lack of training; nor must he shrug his shoulders and let cowardice and indolence persuade him into a false verdict against his better judgment, so that he lies with the very lips with which he called upon the gods when he undertook office. The truth is that he sits in judgment as a teacher of the audience, rather than as its pupil; his function is to throw his weight against them, if pleasure they show has been aroused improperly and illegitimately."
Trevor J. Saunders, trans., “Laws,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), pg. 1350, 658e-659b.
"The exclusion of the public from the parliamentary deliberations could no longer in any event be maintained at a time in which ‘Memory’ Woodfall was able to make the Morning Chronicle into the leading London daily paper because he could reproduce verbatim sixteen columns of parliamentary speeches without taking notes in the gallery of the House of Commons, which was prohibited."
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 61-62.
