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The Eternal Problem
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
— Joan Didion
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Individualism is rubbish. The individual is an entirely powerless unit; it could not give birth to itself, cannot raise itself, educate itself, or change the world itself. It is entirely a product of the people and environment around it. To emphasize the individual is an error.
It’s a hard pill to swallow for westerners brought up in an individualistic mindset…
— ungnyeodongj
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We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.
— Grace Paley
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We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many.
We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and…
