Nate Knows Nada

I have a whole file (33 pages in 10 point, single spacing) of quotes that I have found interesting. I thought I’d include a few this morning, since all my thoughts went out this week in my paper on The West Wing (which you can find here).

“It is an awkward truth that social life is the antidote to scholarly paranoia; it drains intellectual differences of their drama. The cure for the acrimony of intellectuals is dinner. Had Jesus invited a few Pharisees over for the Supper – and the Pharisees, let us remember, had been revolutionaries only a little while before – it might not have been his last. Dining with disciples is a perilous business.”
– Adam Gopnick, The New Yorker, 1 April 2002

“Morality can only be relative, not universal. Ethics must be interpreted in terms of politics; and the search for an ethical norm outside politics is doomed to frustration.”
-E.H. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 21

“Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.”
– Don DeLillo, Underworld (237)

“Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral. Yet, paradoxically, only Americans — a few, that is — ever try to be moral in politics.”
– Gore Vidal (Burr, 520)

“If you could understand a single grain of wheat, you would die of wonder.”
– Martin Luther