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"The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else."
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"Politicians look for interests not people."
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Personal Development
"When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force."
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Personal Development
"Experience is in the fingers and the head. The heart is inexperienced."
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Personal Development
"And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet."
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Personal Development
"I believe the term is 'eminent domain.'Ah, yes. That means 'theft by the government."
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Personal Development
"There is no single truth in a world ruled by many political parties."
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Personal Development
"Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties."
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Personal Development
"Democracy is good, but it is not good for an uneducated dogmatic society. Often, that society does not know how to choose wisely."
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Personal Development
"If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it."
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Personal Development
"Majority wins, but majority is not necessarily right and sometimes majority is awfully wrong."
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Personal Development
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"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
Life
"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
Literature
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
Memory
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
Life
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
Philosophy
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
Observation
"Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death."
Philosophy
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
Philosophy
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
History
"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers " there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
Literature
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