“The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.”
― The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
― The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
“Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato.”
― What is Political Philosophy?
― What is Political Philosophy?
“Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.”
― The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
― The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
“There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.”
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“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
Николай’s 2025 Year in Books
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