The moralists tell us we are all deluded by self-love, yet the familiar declaration I have learned to love myself is faintly repellent. Could such full-frontal narcissism ever really absorb us? Self-love is a kind of triangle. It requires imaginary Others who see us as we would love to be seen.
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The camera makes snap judgments but the mirror is persuadable.
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Over and over, the terrible weakness of the powerful.
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Those who say I'm the kind of person who... somehow never are. They are the kind of people who cheerlead themselves while seeming to be talking to you.
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Confidence is the self’s propagandist.
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Those who talk too little usually know it, those who talk too much usually don’t.
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That rugged individualist is completely independent of our corrupt modernity. All by himself he mined and smelted the ore to make the tools that made the tools that milled the parts of his generator and his rifles, and he drove them to his wild mountain retreat in a 4x4 of his own design.
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The delusion of being an outsider is now far more popular than the delusion of being an insider.
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The knee-jerk skepticism of conspiracists is inseparable from their fantastic credulity.
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Anger is a mine happy to be stepped on.
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The not-so-secret fear of the privileged is that others are more real than they are.
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Beware thinking of the rich as if they were someone else.
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If you don’t want to feel someone’s pain, give them advice.
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You could be anything you want to be! is another way of blaming the victims.
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We urge the young to summits we haven’t admitted to ourselves are lifeless.
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Democracy and individualism are incompatible, since everyone else is clearly wrong.
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Milton tells us even Satan could get 1/3 of the vote.
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Objectivity had better not believe in itself.
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The know-nothing and the know-it-all are that same guy!
