skopia
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.
Turner took the Zong case, where a slaver threw its human cargo overboard for the insurance money, and set it under his most beautiful sunset.
Pechorin seduces, duels, and wrecks lives across the Caucasus, then records in his diary exactly why he does it. Russian fiction took its habit of merciless self-analysis from this bored young officer.
Property is theft, Proudhon answered, meaning property that lets one man live off another's labor. Nobody had called himself an anarchist before, and his quarrel with Marx still splits the left.
I slept and dreamed that life was beauty. I woke-and found that life was duty.
It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.