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Book cover for Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans
The tremendous Trans-Appalachian empire between the mountains and the Mississippi was won almost unnoticed by the people on the coast.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss
“If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
“The secret lies in the method of work; in taking advantage of as much time as possible for the activity; in not retiring for the day until at least two or three hours are dedicated to the task; in wisely constructing a dike in front of the intellectual dispersion and waste of time required by social activity; and finally, in avoiding as much as possible the malicious gossip of the café and other entertainment—which squanders our nervous energy (sometimes even causing disgust) and draws us away from our main task with childish conceits and futile pursuits.”
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

Dean Keith Simonton
“Even worse, those with accomplishments worthy of the designation
"genius" do not always make the IQ cut. When Terman first used the IQ test to select a sample of child geniuses, he unknowingly excluded a special child whose IQ did not make the grade. Yet a few decades later that overlooked talent received the Nobel Prize in physics: William Shockley, the cocreator of the transistor. Ironically, not one of the more than 1,500 children who qualified according to his IQ criterion received so high an honor as adults. Clearly, a Nobel laureate has much greater claim to the term genius than those whose achievements did not win them such applause.”
Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity

Nikos Kazantzakis
“We mortals are the immortals' work battalion.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

Friedrich A. Hayek
“One’s initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligent reflection, and still more appropriate design and ‘rational coordination’ of our undertakings. This leads one to be favourably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism.”
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

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