“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King (@StephenKing)
From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The new measure [of job suitability & performance] takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.
"Seeing an equal person as an inferior object is an act of violence, Lou. It hurts as much as a punch to the face. In fact, in many ways it hurts more. Bruises heal more quickly than emotional scars do.
Three conditions are indeed indispensable to the working of a liberal dynamic society. People must believe strongly enough in truth and fairness; they must trust that their opponents effectively share these ideals; and these ideals must in fact be valid. The great moral and material achievements of modern liberal societies testify convincingly that they fulfilled the first two conditions and that they rightly relied on the presence of the third. There is ample evidence also that whenever any part of a society denies the effectiveness of these ideals in public affairs, it cuts itself off from the rest and engages it in mortal combat.
--Michael Polanyi
The utilitarian theory that social harmony is based on mutual interests is false; mutual interests can be discovered and brought into operation only on the grounds of existing social harmony. This is the principle on which a progressive liberal society actually works. … The beliefs of liberalism are ancient, but their acceptance has recently passed through a deep crisis. In earlier days it was thought that a belief in reason and justice was self-evident. But today we have learned that it is not. Modern man can hold this belief only as an act of faith, as I do myself.
--Michael Polanyi
A tip o' the hat to Nicholas Gruen for both Polanyi quotes.
Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You.
Humans sense the world in two different processes: perception, or signals that come in from the outside world; and conception, or internal understandings that define the world from the inside.
Pyrrhon, according to Timon, held happiness to be the goal of philosophy, and recommended that a person who would be happy should consider the following three questions: What is the nature of things? What is our position in relation to them? What, under the circumstances, should we do? The answers appear as a formulaic series of negations in the tradition of Democritean athambia [imperturbability: a calm and unruffled self-assurance] and Cynic apatheia [“being without passions”]. Questions one and two are answered by three negative adjectives: Things are adiaphora, “nondifferent,” or “without distinguishing marks”; astathme-ta, “nonstable,” or “without fixed essence”; and anepikrita, “nonjudgeable,” or “unable to be reached by concepts.” As a result, Timon quotes, “Neither our perceptions nor our opinions are either true or false.”
