In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave... and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically cons...idered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and ...forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hatred is a thing of the heart, contempt a thing of the head. Hatred and contempt are decidedly antagonistic towards one another a...nd mutually exclusive. A great deal of hatred, indeed, has no other source than a compelled respect for the superior qualities of some other person; conversely, if you were to consider hating every miserable wretch you met you would have your work cut out: it is much easier to despise them one and all. True, genuine contempt, which is the obverse of true, genuine pride, stays hidden away in secret and lets no one suspect its existence: for if you let a person you despise notice the fact, you thereby reveal a certain respect for him, inasmuch as you want him to know how low you rate him--which betrays not contempt but hatred, which excludes contempt and only affects it. Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state mi...ght be composed of slaves, or the animal creation ... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse.... But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many women are reluctant to allow men to enter their domain. They don't want men to acquire skills in what has traditionally been ...their area of competence and one of their main sources of self-esteem. So while they complain about the male's unwillingness to share in domestic duties, they continually push the male out when he moves too confidently into what has previously been their exclusive world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, writt...en from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »