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Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

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When Fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag.

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If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. If you really make them think, they will hate you.

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You are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise.

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For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection-for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.

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We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a great distance, not by virtue of any sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

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If any choose to maintain, as many do, that species were gradually brought to their maturity from humbler forms ... he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it.

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One should count each day a separate life.

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The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

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The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

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