"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."
-Simone Weil
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"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.“
-Simone Weil
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"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."
-Simone Weil
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"What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war."
-Simone Weil
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"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."
-Simone Weil
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"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."
-Simone Weil
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"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace."
-Simone Weil
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"Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers."
-Carlos Fuentes
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"If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society."
-Strom Thurmond
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"For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats."
-Harry Browne
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"There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations."
-Claude Vorilhon
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"This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?"
-Azar Nafisi
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"What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history."
-Barney Frank
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