There is no shore on the other side
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A commonplace book: an old-fashioned literary diary for recording interesting items from reading you've done. I use mine to record snippets from reading, conversation and life in general. (The early 2003 entries are from a period some years ago -- before the blog age -- when I tried an online commonplace book as a straight web page.)
Friday, April 25, 2014
Saturday, April 05, 2014
I cannot help thinking that liberal civilization—the rule of laws, not
men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of
violence—runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and
sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature.
The liberal virtues—tolerance, compromise, reason—remain as valuable as
ever, but they cannot be preached to those who are mad with fear or mad
with vengeance. In any case, preaching always rings hollow. We must be
prepared to defend them by force, and the failure of the sated,
cosmopolitan nations to do so has left the hungry nations sick with
contempt for us.
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
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