Magni Formica Laboris

"We-even in Australia-belong to a civilization deeply rooted in Greek and Judeo-Christian religious thought.  We may not, all of us, believe in pollution, we may not believe in sin, but we do believe in their psychic correlates.  We accept without question that the psyche (or soul) touched with guilty knowledge cannot be well. We do not accept that people with crimes on their conscience can be healthy and happy. We look (or used to look) askance at Germans of a certain generation because they are, in a sense, polluted; in the very signs of their normality (their healthy appetites, their hearty laughter) we see proof of how deeply seated pollution is in them" - p. 21 "I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats." - p. 22 (on the sam...

How fitting.  Reposted from monticello.org: Quotations on Idleness 1787 March 21. (to Martha Jefferson Randolph ). "Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence. Body and mind both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen and every object about us loathsome, even the dearest, Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondria, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever hysterical. Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, chearfulness of mind, and these make us precious to our friends. It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterwards. The fortune of our lives therefore depends on employing well the short period of youth. If at any moment, my dear, you catch yourself in idleness, start from it as you would from a precipice of a gulph. You are not to consider yourself unemployed while taking exercise." 1787 May...