American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.
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Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
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Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
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I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
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If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
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If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
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If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
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Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
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Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.
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States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions."
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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
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The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
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The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.
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Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
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We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
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