“
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .
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John Adams (The works of John Adams,: Second President of the United States (Select bibliographies reprint series))
“
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.
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Thomas Jefferson (A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Reprinted from the Original Ed (Burt Franklin Research and Source Works Series, 833. American))
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There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
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John Adams (The works of John Adams,: Second President of the United States (Select bibliographies reprint series))
“
A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
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Charles Péguy (Basic Verities, Prose, and Poetry (Essay Index Reprint Series))
“
They make a desolation and call it peace.
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Tacitus (C. Cornelii Taciti Germania, Agricola, Et De Oratoribus Dialogus (Classic Reprint) (Latin Edition))
“
Who was it who said, "I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish?" Whoever it was, I agree with him.
”
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A. Edward Newton (A magnificent farce and other diversions of a book collector (Essay index reprint series))
“
A man who works evil against another works it really against himself, and bad advice is worst for the one who devised it
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Hesiod (Works and Days (Academic Monograph Reprint))
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And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge...
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John Adams (The works of John Adams,: Second President of the United States (Select bibliographies reprint series))
“
I can reprint it. And... I was thinking about staying in Virginia permanently after Ellie is back on her feet."
The remorse fled quickly. "Over my dead body."
"Yeah, I thought you'd say that.
”
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Samantha Young (On Dublin Street (On Dublin Street, #1))
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THE OWLS
by: Charles Baudelaire
UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.
Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.
From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;
For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.
”
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Charles Baudelaire
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Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
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John Adams (The works of John Adams,: Second President of the United States (Select bibliographies reprint series))
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Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
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André Gide (Pretexts;: Reflections on literature and morality (Essay index reprint series))
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No man can swim unless he enters deep water.
”
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Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky No. 1: Practical Occultism—Occultism versus the Occult Arts—The Blessings of Publicity)
“
Enough! we're tired, my heart and I.
We sit beside the headstone thus,
And wish that name were carved for us.
The moss reprints more tenderly
The hard types of the mason's knife,
As Heaven's sweet life renews earth's life
With which we're tired, my heart and I ....
In this abundant earth no doubt
Is little room for things worn out:
Disdain them, break them, throw them by!
And if before the days grew rough
We once were loved, used, - well enough,
I think, we've fared, my heart and I.
”
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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One can’t prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person.
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Rudyard Kipling (Book of Words: Selections From Speeches and Addresses Delivered Between 1906 and 1927 (Essay Index Reprint Series))
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If life gives you a passport size dream, don't frame it... Order for a reprint... Go for the bigger picture of you! You deserve a bigger and bright image of you... Go and soar like an eagle!
”
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Israelmore Ayivor (Daily Drive 365)
“
In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers' well-being. The government, they added bitterly, was complicit.
”
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Deborah Blum (The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York)
“
So you, the kings, you too must reflect upon this punishment, because the immortals are here in the midst of manking, observing those who do not hold the gods in awe...but grind each other down with crooked judgements
”
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Hesiod (Works and Days (Academic Monograph Reprint))
“
The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy.
”
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Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
“
Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.
”
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World)
“
When we realize a constant enemy of the soul abides within us, what diligence and watchfulness we should have! How woeful is the sloth and negligence then of so many who live blind and asleep to this reality of sin. There is an exceeding efficacy nad power in the indwelling sin of believers, for it constantly inclines itself towards evil. We need to be awake, then, if our hearts would know the ways of God. Our enemy is not only upon us, as it was with Samson, but it is also in us.
”
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John Owen (Sin and Temptation:The Challenge to Personal Goodness (Regent College Reprint) (Abridged))
“
He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don't. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us.
”
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Peter S. Beagle (A Fine and Private Place)
“
For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.
”
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Elizabeth McCracken (The Giant's House)
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Sin also carries on its war by entangling the affections and drawing them into an alliance against the mind. Grace may be enthroned in the mind, but if sin controls the affections, it has seized a fort from which it will continually assault the soul. Hence, as we shall see, mortification is chiefly directed to take place upon the affections.
”
”
John Owen (Sin and Temptation:The Challenge to Personal Goodness (Regent College Reprint) (Abridged))
“
Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?
I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.
”
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Kenyon Cox (Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting (Essay Index Reprint Series))
“
Arsène Lupin, the eccentric gentleman who operates only in the chateaux and salons, and who, one night, entered the residence of Baron Schormann, but emerged empty-handed, leaving, however, his card on which he had scribbled these words: “Arsène Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine.
”
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Maurice Leblanc (The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar (Short Story Index Reprint Series) (English and French Edition))
“
On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house—or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the Earth. They all go.
If you're a homeowner, you already knew it was only a matter of time for yours, but you've resisted admitting it, even as erosion callously attacked, starting with your savings. Back when they told you what your house would cost, nobody mentioned what you'd also be paying so that nature wouldn't repossess it long before the bank.
”
”
Alan Weisman (The World Without Us Reprint edition by Weisman, Alan (2008) Library Binding)
“
Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens
“
Fictional Characters"
Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?
Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o'clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.
Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.
Maybe they grew tired
of the author's mind,
all its twists and turns.
Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.
For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they'd been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.
Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.
Wouldn't you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,
your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.
"Fictional Characters" by Danusha Laméris from The Moons of August. © Autumn House Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission
”
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Danusha Laméris