Quotations on thinking, speaking and writing (18)

“We live our whole lives one step away from clarity.”
~Pat Barker (pictured), in Double Vision

“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.”
~Christopher Morley

“Women as ‘sex objects’? Of course they are sex objects, and praise the Lord they always will be. (Just as men, of course, are sex objects to women.) ... When deeper relationships are established between men and women, they each become more than sex objects to each other; they each hopefully become love objects as well. It would seem banal even to bother mentioning this, but in today’s increasingly degenerate intellectual climate [1970] no simple truths can any longer be taken for granted.”
~Murray Rothbard

“You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.”
~Jonathan Kozol

“We strive to soothe our madness by intoning more and more vacuous cliches. And at such times, far from being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans take on a dreadful power.”
~Thomas Merton, on the Cold War cliche “Red or dead.”

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