“America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.”
Source: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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Jonah Goldberg 89
American political writer and pundit 1969Related quotes

1851
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)
Context: Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

[...] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
Vol. II, Seminumerical Algorithms, Section 4.2.2 part A, final paragraph [Italics in source]
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

“It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved.”
A message he left on his website to his fans, dated September 18th, 2003
2003

more and louder than ever before.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)
Calvin Mooers (1959) Mooers' law: or, why some retrieval systems are used and others are not. p. 138
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: About the last place any of us can expect to learn anything important about the realities we have to cope with in our wistful pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is a classroom. If we decided that schools must do whatever is necessary to help students to learn the concepts and skills relevant to the nuclear space age, we wouldn't spend much time sitting inside of small boxes inside of boxes — even with all the fancy hardware being developed to jazz up the Trivia contest. It's probably true that most of what we all know we didn't learn in school anyway. Moreover, developments in electronic information processing make the school as it presently exists unnecessary... the "new education." Its purpose is to produce people who can cope effectively with change. To date, none of the new "educational technology" has that as its purpose. Remember Santayana's line: Fanaticism consists of redoubling efforts after having forgotten one's aim. The developments in "educational technology" are intended to do all of the old school stuff better... but that's not the aim of the new education.

Paul Waugh, "Benn retires to spend more time with his politics", The Independent, 28 June 1999, p. 5.
1990s