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De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
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Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
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God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
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There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
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What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
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One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
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Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
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It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
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Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
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Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
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A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
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Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
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Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
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Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
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God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
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There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
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The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.