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People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recog...more

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Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

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How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

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You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

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I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.

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This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. M...more

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What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is...more

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Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

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wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritua...more

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The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

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you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability...more

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Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.

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Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

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[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

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Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when t...more