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The fair seemed a consummate achievement of human idealism and beauty; the city—apart from its suburbs—an irresistible expression of materialism and uncouth power. How the one could have given birth to the other seemed a troubling paradox,
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![Jacques Barzun](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1217997216i/16173._UX200_CR0,33,200,200_.jpg)
“... in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs.”
― From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
― From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
![Louis Menand](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1277840144i/15874._UX200_CR0,43,200,200_.jpg)
“The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.”
― The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
― The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
![Aristotle](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1651532053i/2192._UX200_CR0,33,200,200_.jpg)
“The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
― The Nicomachean Ethics
― The Nicomachean Ethics
![Jacques Barzun](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1217997216i/16173._UX200_CR0,33,200,200_.jpg)
“It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.”
― From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
― From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
![Aldous Huxley](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1547138835i/3487._UY200_CR11,0,200,200_.jpg)
“Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.”
― Themes and Variations
― Themes and Variations
![137714](https://images.gr-assets.com/groups/1402965317p1/137714.jpg)
Study and discussion of the important questions of ethical and political philosophy from Confucius and Socrates to the present. Rules (see also the ...more
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