In their different modes, Hodge and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne were conservative counterinstances to the callow picture of the early American national spirit as liberal, democratic, and optimistic.
[Gustav] Le Bon divided crowds into heterogeneous (with mixed membership) or homogeneous (the same sort of members). The first kind could be “anonymous” (street crowds) or “non-anonymous” (juries or parliaments, both prone to groupthink). Homogeneous crowds included sects and castes (for example, priests, judges, military officers, or factory workers), as well as social classes (the peasantry, the middle-classes). When crowd-thinking seized a social caste, it tended to crystallize and last. The caste then listened only to itself and sought to capture authority in order to control the masses.
Communicability itself therefore becomes one of the central issues of this philosophy. In [Karl] Jaspers’s view, communication is the pre-eminent form of philosophical participation, which is at the same time communal philosophizing whose purpose is not to produce results but to “illuminate existence.” The similarity of this method to Socrates’s maieutic method is obvious, except that what Socrates would have called maieutic method, Jaspers calls appeal.
The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
“There is only one way to avoid criticism. Do nothing. Be nothing. Say nothing.” —Aristotle
"My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing."
— Ernest Hemingway
The quickest to be offended are the easiest to manipulate. (Anon.)
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done."
— Steve Jobs
"Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil."
— Hannah Arendt
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