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For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone--when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will--then only will you have achieved.
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Louis Menand |
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knowledge is cut off from the activity in which it has its meaning, and becomes a false abstraction.
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Louis Menand |
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We do not (on Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought--even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours.
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Louis Menand |
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The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods o..
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Louis Menand |
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the indeterminacy of individual behavior can be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass.
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Louis Menand |
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Mere mouthpieces of a party, take away the party & they shrivel & vanish.
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Louis Menand |
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confused begging of some philosophical question,
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Louis Menand |
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Abbott had also impressed on Holmes, possibly by his conversation but certainly by his example, the belief that nobility of character consists in doing one's job with indifference to ends,
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Louis Menand |
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Holmes never mentions Abbott again in any of the war correspondence or the diaries that survive.
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Louis Menand |
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organized study deadens the mind, and that genuine insight arises spontaneously from the individual soul.
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Louis Menand |
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when we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are.
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Louis Menand |
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that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.
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Louis Menand |
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active habit involving an exertion of will.
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Louis Menand |
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All that can be expected from modern improvements is that legislation should easily and quickly, yet not too quickly, modify itself in accordance with the will of the de facto supreme power in the community,
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Louis Menand |
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successful people, like Morgan and Rockefeller, just had a better grasp of social tendencies than unsuccessful people
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Louis Menand |
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statistical fiction,
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Louis Menand |
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the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.
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Louis Menand |