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“There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.”
― My Struggle: Book 5
― My Struggle: Book 5
“Every society reproduces its culture, its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience— in the individual, in the form of personality.”
― The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
― The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
“The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that 'only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate.”
― The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
― The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
“Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.”
― The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
― The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
“They retained only the faintest recollection of what they had lost and had no desire to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They derided the mere possibility of this former felicity of theirs and termed it a day-dream. They could not even picture it to themselves in images and forms, but strange and wondrous to relate, having lost any credence in their former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so longed to be innocent and happy once more, all over again that, childlike, they fell down before this, their heart's desire, deified it, built temples, and began to worship their own idea, their own 'desire', and tearfully bowed before it in adoration, while at the same time utterly discounting its feasibility or the possibility of its realization. However, had it ever become possible for them to return to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone could have shown it to them again and asked if they wanted to return to it, they would certainly have refused.”
― The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
― The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Mike’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Mike’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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