Limitations Quotes (page 24)
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Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few...
James Q. Wilson
The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect. More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.
Naomi Wolf
War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to...
George Orwell
There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...
William S. Burroughs
Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be thegreatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere ofknowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentiallyperverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man somethingin his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay thenoblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits ofdepravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the humanrace, in which villainy--nay,...
Arthur Schopenhauer
To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.
Christopher Hitchens
Now in those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours and fives, these being like auto-teams, for being a comfy number for an auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for big nightwar, but mostly it was best to roam in these like small numbers.
Anthony Burgess