Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist
As quoted in Sicko is Socko, Richard, Corliss, Time, 19 May 2007 http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1623337,00.html, <br class="br">2007
“No exercise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than marginally better than who we are.”
— James Blish, book The Quincunx of Time
Source: The Quincunx of Time (1973), Chapter 10, “Weinbaum on Sinai” (pp. 118-119)
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James Blish30
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Context: Ultimately what we really are matters more than what other people think of us. One has to face the modern world with its good as well as its bad and it is better on the whole, I think, that we give even licence than suppress the normal flow of opinion. That is the democratic method. But having laid that down, still I would beg to say that there is a limit to the licence that one can allow, more so in times of great peril to the State.
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The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Context: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.