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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4a5e714 | Once again the historian who wishes to understand this difficult period must try to read between the lines. It | Donald Kagan | ||
| 4acd26b | The development of hoplite warfare took place in this context of novel agrarianism, which promoted a particular type of moral excellence. | Donald Kagan | ||
| a59f872 | Fair and good [kalon ... agathon] the man who falls fighting in the front rank, dying for the fatherland. | Donald Kagan | ||
| 8f24495 | The Spartan attitude reflected an important fact about the condition of the Greek world from 479 to 461: Its stability was apparent only and not real. The alliance between Sparta and Athens was not an alliance of states but of factions. The faction of Cimon and the faction that would be headed by King Archidamus were prepared to accept limits to the hegemonal claims of their states, but in each state there were significant elements of the p.. | Donald Kagan | ||
| 244ffc9 | The hoplites drove the tyrants from power and created broad oligarchies in their place. | Donald Kagan | ||
| 90d540d | These georgoi in turn shaped the ideals, institutions, and culture that gave rise to the polis. Unlike any prior civilization, the culture of the Greek polis combined citizen militias with the rule of law. That involved having a broad middle class of independent small landowners that met in assemblies where the votes of these nonelite determined laws, and foreign and domestic policy. These smallholders gained in status as population growth .. | Donald Kagan | ||
| 31a30cb | Philolaus of Corinth (about 730 B.C.?) had supposedly enacted regulations ensuring that the farms at Thebes might remain the same number in perpetuity. The Corinthian Pheidon, "one of the most ancient of the lawgivers," purportedly argued that the population and the number of plots ought always to remain roughly equal. An even more shadowy figure, Phaleas the Chalcedonian, advanced the concept that all citizens of the polis ought to hold eq.. | Donald Kagan | ||
| e550fb7 | Er zijn dingen die je alleen maar kunt begrijpen als je ze in retrospectief bekijkt, wanneer er jaren overheen gegaan zijn en het verhaal al is afgelopen. Voordat dat het geval is, en zolang het verhaal nog verder gaat, is het enige wat je kunt doen het steeds opnieuw vertellen terwijl het zich ontwikkelt, zich opsplitst, met zichzelf in de knoop raakt. Want voor iets begrepen kan worden moet het vele keren vermeld worden, in veel verschill.. | Valeria Luiselli | ||
| 92f492c | Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf. | Anton Chekhov | ||
| b8bfea3 | Love is a scandal of the personal sort. | Anton Chekhov | ||
| b8963e4 | This is arete; this is the best human prize and the fairest for a young man to win." The man who fights without pause among the promachoi "is a common good (xynon esthlon) for the polis and all the people (demos)." ... "If he falls among the promachoi and loses his dear life, he brings honor to his town (asty) and his people (laoi) and his father." Young and old alike lament him / and his entire polis mourns with painful regret. / His tomb .. | Donald Kagan | ||
| 8294dc8 | Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside of What would happen then? I wonder what my sister, who understand books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She's so good at explaining books and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she'd say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children - books like that short story by Garcia Marquez, "Light is L.. | children imagination reality | Valeria Luiselli | |
| a7e26b3 | Everyone says they're empty. Everyone says - vast and flat. Everyone - mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere - indomitable. But no one had ever told use about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes. | storms | Valeria Luiselli | |
| fe4fc2c | Euphemisms hide, erase, coat. Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget. Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat. | Valeria Luiselli | ||
| e219d87 | suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic and military powers. | Valeria Luiselli | ||
| 47be145 | But I suppose it's always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic .. | Valeria Luiselli | ||
| 5c72765 | He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they'd been the last Apache leaders--moral, political, military--of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender. | Valeria Luiselli | ||
| 55a2a2f | And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| 932a8f7 | As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? --Psalm 42 | Julian Jaynes | ||
| 800198b | There is no distinction made by the child between subject, action, and object because for him they are effectively all the same -- he is the locus of the action, both its subject and its object at once."15" | Marcel Kuijsten | ||
| 7a5dd94 | We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over th.. | church-politics inquisition science-vs-religion the-auguries-of-science | Julian Jaynes | |
| 7637742 | Completely unrecognized is the whole presumption of this saying according to which individual body parts could possess independent volition and as such can inform (sway/direct) the acting of the whole body. Even more seriously -- the presumption that self-mutilation can stop or somehow influence higher mental processes. Even the person who is not a trained psychologist or psychiatrist can recognize that we are dealing with a seriously patho.. | Marcel Kuijsten | ||
| c3e0529 | Language too is a brake upon social change. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| 224d519 | Courtiers in some of their inscriptions referring to the king say, "I did what his ka loved" or "I did that which his ka approved," | Julian Jaynes | ||
| e2e4658 | A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other. | Anton Chekhov | ||
| 1d5b9a4 | Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it. | Anton Chekhov | ||
| edb6fda | Gravettian men stood on average six feet tall. When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature. Men lost eight inches of height. The drop was likely the result of Europeans switching to a grain-rich diet much lower in protein. | Carl Zimmer | ||
| 50acac7 | Less than a decade later there was experimental support for the right hemispheric involvement of "intrusive" experiences into awareness. Although imaging technology has shown us that the cerebral volume in which "mind space" exists is configurational and complex, the results strongly support Jaynes's essential thesis. But perhaps the most compelling congruence with Jaynes's insights is genetics. Within the last five years science has found .. | Marcel Kuijsten | ||
| d6f78c0 | He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| cb3d7f2 | What triggered these hallucinations? I suggest it was even the slight stress of making a decision in a novel circumstance, whereas in ourselves in modern times the stress threshold for such triggering of a verbal hallucination is much higher. The reason they are so prevalent in all cultures today, in the hospital patients and homeless I have talked about, in children and speechless quadriplegics, is because they were once the genetic basis .. | Marcel Kuijsten | ||
| 306e168 | nkhstyn sh`rn khdyn bwdnd | Julian Jaynes | ||
| 64be4c8 | Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a "dying god," not "life caught in the spell of death," or "a dead god," as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's n.. | dead-god egyptian-mythology hallucination horus memphite-theology mummification osiris | Julian Jaynes | |
| f39f460 | Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| 4a631d3 | CIVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| df1dec1 | The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| 472837d | Signal learning (or classical or conditioning) is the simplest example [of learning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-kno.. | classical-conditioning consciousness pavlov signal-learning unconscious-learning | Julian Jaynes | |
| 83d3a12 | In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood just five foot five. | Carl Zimmer | ||
| 2de603d | For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt. | microbiology science virus wonders-of-nature | Carl Zimmer | |
| 97d96da | There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed. | Carl Zimmer | ||
| b4af81e | It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest. | Anton Chekhov | ||
| 631c9e9 | They made a compelling case that height could serve as an economic barometer, recording the well-being of societies. | Carl Zimmer | ||
| 28105f7 | Today, Latvian women have become the tallest women in the world, jumping from about five foot one to five foot seven. Dutch men rose from five foot seven in 1860 to just over six feet tall, making them the tallest men on Earth. | Carl Zimmer | ||
| b23d559 | In fact, Galton believed England's future well-being depended on a national breeding program to produce more talented humans. | Carl Zimmer | ||
| 9f06ee7 | He imagined this program as a joyous ritual, bringing gifted young people together to have better and better children. | Carl Zimmer |