The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas MannRead
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
Interpretation
Freedom and equality can often conflict in democratic societies.
In this quote, Thomas Mann highlights the inherent tension between freedom and equality within a democratic system. He suggests that while both concepts are foundational to democracy, they can be contradictory because granting absolute freedom to individuals may undermine collective equality, just as the needs of society can overshadow individual rights.
In practice
In a debate on civil rights, this quote can illustrate the struggle between personal freedoms and the pursuit of equality.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races... very handy.
Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
The (method of) correction shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn become evil.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.
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