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Left Quotes

“The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.”

Looks Left Impossible Society Idols Preoccupation Smashing

Book:A Preface to Morals

Source: A Preface to Morals

“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46

“The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.”

“Whatever power may be necessary for the National Government a certain portion must necessarily be left in the States. It is impossible for one power to pervade the extreme parts of the U.S. so as to carry equal justice to them.”

May States Government Certain Left Justice Impossible Equal Extremes Portions Equal Justice

Author:George Mason

“We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety -- and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.”

“With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. ... Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.”

Thinking Left Impossible Ego Understood Philosophical Abolition Aloof

Book:Zeitschrift Fur Sozialforschung

Source: Zeitschrift Fur Sozialforschung

“The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.”

Writing Reality Left Language Grows Impossible Bones Sentences Mistrust Skeletons Hardness One Sentence

Book:No time like the present

Source: No time like the present