On education

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

George Elliot, Daniel Deronda.

Poesía

Pomelo,  o melón,  o fruta de estación.

H. Tarnower,  S. Sinclair Baker. Almuerzo del Miércoles, La dieta médica Scarsdale para 14 días. En La dieta Médica Scarsdale.

½ taza de ananá fresco cortado en dados.

o ½ mango.

o ½ mamón.

o una generosa rodaja de melón.

H. Tarnower,  S. Sinclair Baker. Desayuno diario, Dieta Scarsdale gourmet. loc. cit.

On baldness.

...and in church we sing: “The mockers of Elisha, while he went up to the house of God, felt the zeal of the bald”.[...] For if the many mockers of Elisha, who was only one bald man, felt the zeal of the bald, how much more will it be felt by one mocker of many friars, among whom are many bald men? And we have a papal bull, by which all who mock us are excommunicated.

Thomas More, Utopia.

Perfection

Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It's not about
winning. It's about you and your relationship with yourself, your
family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look
your friends in the eye and know that you didn't let them down because
you told them the truth. And that truth is you did everything you
could. There wasn't one more thing you could've done. Can you live in
that moment as best you can, with clear eyes, and love in your heart,
with joy in your heart? If you can do that, gentleman--you're perfect.

Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines, in the movie Friday night lights.

Righteous behavior/thinking.

Now you see how little freedom they have for being idle. There is no pretext for laziness, no wine taverns, no alehouses, no brothels, no occasion for vice, no lurking places, no secret meetings. Thus, under the watchful eyes of all, they must perform their usual work or enjoy honorable leisure.

Thomas More, Utopia.

We are not content with negative disobedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselvers before we kill him.  It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. [...] By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother.

George Orwell, 1984.

The end  of history.

The writer’s mind runs back fifty years, to an afternoon in London in the year 1897. He is sitting with his father at a window in Fleet Street and watching a procession of Canadian and Australian mounted troops who have come to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.  He can still remember his excitement at the unfamiliar, picturesque uniforms of these magnificent ``colonial” troops, as they were still called in England then: slouch hats instead of brass helmets, grey tunics instead of red. To an English child, this sight gave a sense of new life astir in the world; a philosopher, perhaps, might have reflected that, where there is growth, there is likely also to be decay. A poet, watching the same scene, did, in fact, catch and express an intimation of something of the kind. Yet few in the English crowd gazing at that march of overseas troops in London in 1897 were in the mood of Kipling’s Recessional. They saw their sun standing at its zenith and assumed that it was there to stay-without their even needing to give it the maigcally compelling word of command which Joshua had uttered on a famous occasion.

The author of the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua was at any rate aware that any stand-still of Time was something unusual.  ``There was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of man”.  Yet the middle-class English in 1897, who thought of themselves as Wellsian rationalists living in a scientific age, took their imaginary miracle for granted. As they saw it, history, for them, was over.

Arnold Toynbee, (1948). Civilization on trial. 

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Francis Fukuyama, (1992 ). The end of history and the last man.