A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

For those who don’t believe, no explanation is possible.

For those who do, no explanation is necessary.

There is no solution because there is no problem.

I just like - just breathing. I like breathing better than working.

“Marcel Duchamp” in The Mysteries and What’s So Funny by David Gordon

It is easier to build strong children than broken men.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

More here.

Too often we measure everything and understand nothing.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

Man is a senseless coincidence who circles a sun like a piece of intergalactic driftwood for a fraction of a cosmic second, desperately struggling to make sense of the nonsense between birth and death.

Industry expanded quickly. The happily prospering businessman needed  a vast number of mechanics, engineers, and supervisors to fulfill the profit requirements of an economic strategy which served exclusively the demands of mass-production prosperity. The common denominator was quick specialization, without any consideration for biological fundamentals. Vocational schools were founded for the required specialists. Fields of production were specialized and segregated from each other in the hope that the output would be greater if they were not distracted by manifold interests. Creative abilities, concentrated on limited problems, produced stunning results, expanding the boundaries of the capitalistic economy.

The wheels of industry turned fast and prompted a clear division of all labor, neglecting everything but these divided functions. All former responsibility and pride of the craftsman in the wholeness of a  product was now eliminated. Participation in the mass-production process was limited to the execution of a small detail. As the laborer was deprived of the incentive and assurance of working for a creative result dependent upon his abilities for completion, the vital fluid which, as in a battery, carries the current from one unit to the other, evaporated. He became inanimate, working in the maze of tunnels and gangways of the specialized labyrinths.

With growing industrial opportunities the entire educational system attained a vocational aspect. Schools lost sight of their best potential quality: universality. They lost their sense of synthesis to the extent of a complete separation of the various types of experience. On the other hand “prosperity” increased, and with it the temptation to enlarge profits. Everyone seemed satisfied. Production figures and balance sheets “spoke for themselves,” being sufficient justification of training for profit.