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Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor.The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted in the field without becoming part of an edifice.

Fame to be sweet must resound in the ears of those we love, in the atmosphere of the land that will guard our ashes. Fame should hover over our tomb to warm with its heat the chill of death, so that we may not be completely reduced to nothingness, that something of us may survive.

There are no tyrants where there are no slaves.

Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?

You must shatter the vase to spread its perfume, and smite the rock to get the spark.

Pure and spotless must the victim be if the sacrifice is to be acceptable.

All revolutions are to some degree about money.

The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy.

In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force.

It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.

Whatever steps are taken, one of the great obstacles to restoring cod stocks off of Newfoundland is an almost pathological collective denial of what has happened. Newfoundlanders seem prepared to believe anything other than that they have killed off nature’s bounty.