Louis MacNeice on Oxford

You can never really again
Believe anything that anyone says, and that is an asset
In a world like ours.

Anita Desai on Gandhi

Gandhi did not follow the traditional Indian formula: his ashram was based not on religion but on universal humanistic thought. How had this come about? Joseph Lelyveld believes that "if there is a single seminal experience in his intellectual development," it was reading Tolstoy's The Kingdom Of God Is Within You. The Hindu revolutionary Sri Aurobindo went so far as to say, "Gandhi is a European - truly a Russian Christian in an Indian body."

David Wallace on boredom

To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

David Wallace on AA

They somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time....

They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to "Get In Touch" with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you were dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anaesthetic. "Getting In Touch With Your Feelings" is another-quilted-sampler type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

Bronowski on the good life

The good life is more than just material decency. But it must be based on material decency.

The Economist on public sector reform

Despite all that rhetoric from the tea-partiers, big government is not just the fault of self-interested bureaucrats and leftist politicians. Conservative voters, even if they don’t like taxes, have kept on demanding that the state does more. Just as the left has built hospitals, announced endless programmes to help the poor and indulged the teachers’ unions, the right has built prisons, announced wars on drugs and terror, and indulged generals, farmers and policemen. 

The wisdom of Herb Stein

“IF something cannot go on for ever, it will stop,” Herb Stein once observed caustically. The American economist’s aphorism has proved apt of late—as applicable to Hosni Mubarak’s regime as it was to America’s rising property prices....


From The Economist.