“Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.”
― Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
― Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
“No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.”
― Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses
― Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses
“How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness?”
― Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline
― Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”
― Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
― Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
“Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth--far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly; the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth.”
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Николай’s 2025 Year in Books
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