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Quote by Thomas Powers

“The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper: paper can be lost or stolen or simply inherited by the wrong people; if you really want to keep something secret, don't write it down.”

Quote by Thomas Powers

Author

Thomas Powers is an esteemed American historian and author, born on December 12, 1940. His works are known for their in-depth historical research and unique narrative style, covering topics such as politics, history, and intelligence. more

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“Fantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagination is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.”

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Author:Roger Scruton

“The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.”

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“There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.”

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“In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.”

Source: Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results.”

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Author:J. Willard Gibbs

“We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.”

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“[When asked if she believed in "women's lib":] Not really. Not when I see what most of them look like.”

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“It could be so beautiful here if the Americans themselves had not made it so ugly with their big buildings, their millions of cars, and noise.”

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“scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.”

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Book:The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays

Source: The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays

“Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.”

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