Quote

What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted

Lin Yutang

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Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Certain
Liberty
Doctrines
Today
Modern
Liberties
Human
Common
Conception
Humans
Values
Doctrine
Averted
Men
Freedom
Changing
Entailed
Life
War
Threat
Undermining
Political
Importance
Threatens
Dream
Civilization
Restoring

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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
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Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
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No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.
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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
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A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
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The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.
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The wise man reads both books and life itself.
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Art is both creation and recreation.
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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
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However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.
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We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
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I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.
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Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.
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As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
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The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.
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A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.
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To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
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