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Monday 8 May 2017

Quotes 9 May 17

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw ‘the People’. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems. -Theodore Dalrymple (1949-), _City Journal_ Summer 2001

“And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.” - A World Split Apart -Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), addressed the 1978 graduating class of Harvard University

 "I love the West, despite its vices and crimes. I love the vision of the prophets and the grace of the Parthenon, Roman order and the cathedrals, reason and the passionate longing for freedom. I love the perfection of western rural landscapes, the measure inherent in all it has produced, the great goals it has set itself. I love the West.
   There is no need to remind me of the mines at Laurium and the crucifixion of slaves, the massacres of the Aztecs and the stake of the Inquisition. I know all about them, but I also know that, despite all those things, the history of the West is not a history of unrelieved criminality, and that what the West has given to the world weighs infinitely more in the scales than what it has done to societies and individuals." - Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West

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