By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.
I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it.
Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain's survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.
The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.
Viewed from a holistic ecological perspective, some meat - such as conscientiously hunted animals - involves less suffering and environmental damage than arable agriculture, while both of these are significantly less harmful than indiscriminately pur...
Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the ...
Mary: Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders. [they click glasses] Mary: Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Found it in my Bartlett's.
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
Millions of Americans cannot tell you who lived at Mount Vernon or who wrote the Declaration of Independence - let alone the Emancipation Proclamation. But they know that to be 'a Benedict Arnold' is to be a traitor of the deepest dye - someone who c...
Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken ...
I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.
If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.
There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobb...
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
Everyone on the Left has a favorite story that allows them to kind of excuse Reagan, explain away Reagan, say he was dumb, but unless we reckon with that kind of emotional intelligence and his ability to kind of speak to the aspirations of the Americ...
NOVIA. ¡Porque yo me fui con el otro, me fui! (Con angustia.) Tú también te hubieras ido. Yo era una mujer quemada, llena de llagas por dentro y por fuera,y tu hijo era un poquito de agua de la que yo esperaba hijos, tierra, salud; pero el otro er...
Que j'aime voir, chère indolente, De ton corps si beau, Comme une étoffe vacillante, Miroiter la peau! Sur ta chevelure profonde Aux acres parfums, Mer odorante et vagabonde Aux flots bleus et bruns, Comme un navire qui s'éveille Au vent du matin,...
Recorrí pasillos y galerías en espiral pobladas por cientos, miles de tomos que parecían saber más acerca de mí que yo de ellos. Al poco, me asaltó la idea de que tras la cubierta de cada uno de aquellos libros se abría un universo infinito po...
If I were stranded on a desert island, and could have only one person and three things with me, I’d want Nietzsche, a pen, paper, and a stick-on mustache.
Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity— saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched agai...
It's a philosophical minefield!" Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together.
