the monkey speaks

ian leslie's bits and pieces

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"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" Søren Kierkegaard

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Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour."

T.S. Eliot

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Adorno, 1939 on this Rembrandt self-portrait: “this painting seems to me to record a primal bourgeois experience. It could almost be called that of the law of value. Here the exchange of equivalents means: there is no happiness which is not paid for by an equal measure of sorrow”

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Give the people what they want When they want And they wants it all the time Parliament/George Clinton

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“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.” Joseph Schumpeter

[themonkeyspeakshismind]

"All writing is generated by a certain minimum of ego: you must assume a position of authority in saying that the way I’m writing it is the only way it happened. Writer’s block, for example, is simply a failure of ego." Norman Mailer

[themonkeyspeakshismind]

"The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying." Alfred North Whitehead

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“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him." - Dostoyevsky

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"Exchange of information was to the modernist capital what the contemplation of nature was to the eighteenth century."  Robert Hughes

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"In every ability, there is an ingredient which cannot be resolved into information, and in some skills this may be the greater part of the knowledge required." Michael Oakeshott

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“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonised the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics all the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason.[...] All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. Burke, Reflections

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"You want to be a songwriter? Just listen to 'Big River' about 60 times, and you'll write something." Tom Petty

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"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.” - Marcel Proust

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“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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“The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.” G.K. Chesterton

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"If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people." Timothy Leary