Leon Wieseltier famous quotes

03-28-2025

Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Character #Google #Age
No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Deeds #Bliss #Certainty
The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyoneâ€™s drunk and ugly and theyâ€™re going to pass out in a few minutes.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Blue #Boston #Drunk
The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Velocity #Forgotten #Volume
A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy,
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Democracy #Citizens
There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Language #Power Of Language #Needed
The world invited me many places.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#World
What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Commitment #What Matters #Obsession
Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Money #Media #Stories
Her book about the money in sex gives you the feeling of the sex in money.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Sex #Book #Giving
Use the new technologies for the old purposes.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Technology #Purpose #Use
I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Morality #Values
Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.
-- Leon Wieseltier
There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Religious #People #Moral
I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Thinking #Two #Said
But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight â€” matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in oneâ€™s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Beautiful #Wall #Block
Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it.
-- Leon Wieseltier

#Book #Philosophical #Reflection

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