“… the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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David Foster Wallace 185
American fiction writer and essayist 1962–2008

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“There is an obvious discrepancy between the stereotype anarchist and the anarchist as we most often see him in reality; that division is due partly to semantic confusions and partly to historical misunderstandings.”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

Prologue
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)
Context: Anarchism, nihilism, and terrorism are often mistakenly equated, and in most dictionaries will be found at least two definitions of the anarchist. One presents him as a man who believes that government must die before freedom can live. The other dismisses him as a mere promoter of disorder who offers nothing in place of the order he destroys. In popular thought the latter conception is far more widely spread. The stereotype of the anarchist is that of the cold-blooded assassin who attacks with dagger or bomb the symbolic pillars of established society. Anarchy, in popular parlance, is malign chaos.
Yet malign chaos is clearly very far from the intent of men like Tolstoy and Godwin, Thoreau and Kropotkin, whose social theories have all been described as anarchist. There is an obvious discrepancy between the stereotype anarchist and the anarchist as we most often see him in reality; that division is due partly to semantic confusions and partly to historical misunderstandings.

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“The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

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“The hardest compromise to make is when you decide to appear to compromise. Often the deception becomes the reality long before you realize it.”

Source: Book 1, Chapter 5 “The Machine” (p. 160), The Mad God's Amulet (1968)

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