Notable Quotable 290

Jun 10, 2024

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

- Thomas Jefferson

Modern mass culture, aimed at the “consumer”, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

- Andrei Tarkovsky

By compassion we mean the deep feeling that comes when we recognize our soul's reflection in another person, when that other person's pain or joy becomes our own.

- Cindy Spring , Charles Garfield ‘Wisdom Circles’

I have nothing positive to say about popular culture, and nothing positive to say about the cultural establishment… We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work. Popular culture contains pockets of gentleness and melody. Architects, writers and composers produce works which are neither kitsch nor ‘kitsch’. Prayer and penitence have been interrupted, but not forgotten. To those who wish for it, the ethical life may still be retrieved. Ours is a catacomb culture, a flame kept alive by undaunted monks. And what the monks of Europe achieved in a former dark age, they might achieve again.

- Sir Roger Scruton

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world." - Eugene V. Debs

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot unlearn the lies they have been taught to believe.

- Alvin Toffler