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Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.

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Thanks to words we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned b...more

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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of p...more

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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. ...more

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We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic ...more

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The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers,...more

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There was something called Christianity.

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La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes...more

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On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompat...more

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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men...more

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To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at ...more