“I felt that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure meaning which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain motions had to be made, certain words spoken: I staggered under the weight of my responsibility.”
― Nausea
― Nausea
“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.”
― The Overstory
― The Overstory
“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
― The Overstory
― The Overstory
“Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests”
― What Is History?
― What Is History?
Duncan’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Duncan’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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