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A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
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Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.
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Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
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Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.
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In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.
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The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
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I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
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If you don't have a vision for the future, then your future is threatened to be a repeat of the past.
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The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.
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Calvinism is an all-embracing system of principles... It is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and form that specific religious consciousness there was developed first a particular theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life.
