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L Quotes

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All L Quotes

“Liars are highly unlikely to admit their lies, never mind apologize for the hurt they’ve caused. Liars don’t genuinely apologize. Deceit has become their full-out lifestyle. They are centered on themselves with no thoughts of the consequences of their lies. In cowardly style, they tell more lies to try and cover their tracks. They are not good at admitting they actually have shortcomings.”

“Liars gain a huge advantage over truth-tellers, you know. Truth has been found to be a terrible weakness, an evolutionary catastrophe. The society that coated itself with lies was found to be a better survival machine. The man who told the truth was extraordinarily naive and stupid. Now the expectation is always of being lied to. Nowadays when one man is talking to another, he knows instinctively he is being lied to and his mind automatically overlays that set of lies with a neutralizing set of lies, leaving behind a kind of truth. But what sort of truth is it that arises exclusively from lies?”

“Lib had been working all day at the sewing machine, running up new house-dresses for the womenfolk. When Lib launched into a long seam, she pushed the treadle so fast the whole machine rocked like a boat. The needle ate up the goods like a prairie fire eating up grass. Lib hated sewing and she didn't propose to spend any more of her life than needed to be turning out house-dresses for the female inmates of the Rock County Poor Farm. When she hit a long seam the poor Singer hummed and whined. The seams Lib sewed were saw-toothed, but they were in to stay. She sewed a firm stitch and she put the stitches far from the edge. . .when she held up one of her uneven seams for inspection, she consoled herself by saying, "It'll never be seen on a galloping horse.”

“Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.”

“Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. ... It is at the same time a training in boldness. ... It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions”

“Liberal gardeners are people who feel that, through gardening, we can alleviate our sense of alienation from nature; and that, through good gardening, we can repair some of the damage we have done to our environment. The most extreme liberals believe that there is an original or a natural state in which the environment would be if we hadn't shown up on the scene, and that we have not only the ability but also a moral imperative to help nature return to this state.”

“Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.”