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"We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful."
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"Patriotism is the narcissism of countries."
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Personal Development
"Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions."
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Personal Development
"Some people had attack dogs. Ghastek had attack lawyers."
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Personal Development
"All authority belongs to the people."
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Personal Development
"A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards."
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Personal Development
"Communism, I observed, "is a pile of wank."
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Personal Development
"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee..."
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Personal Development
"Make them fear you. Machiavelli said it nearly six hundred years ago, but it's still true. Every ruler should strive for his people to love him. But if they cannot love you, then make them fear you. Love is better, but fear will do the job."
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Personal Development
"I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day."
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Personal Development
"An empty stomach is not a good political adviser."
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"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
Society
"That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience."
Life
"It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin."
Life
"The world was a vale of tears-it always had been."
Philosophy
"And the memory made her humble, for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful."
Reflection
"Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so."
Literature
"Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks."
Sacrifice
"In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fAated these people and fed their vanity."
Society
"International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky."
Society
"We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on."
Ethics
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