"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens."
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Source: Joseph Brodsky's commencement address at Williams College (1984), as quoted in Robert Inchausti Thinking through Thomas Merton: Contemplation for Contemporary Times (p. 110), 2014.
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