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"A nation can be maintained only if, between the state and the individual, there is interposed a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way, into the general torment of civil life."

-- Emile Durkheim

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"The art of association then becomes, as I have said before, the mother of action, studied and applied by all."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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"Modernity in its essence means an enormous change in the human condition, from fate to choice."

-- Peter Berger

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Learning history isn't mostly about "a-ha moments." It's about laboring through a lot of information and ideas that are often less than magical.

Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can't. No technology ever has.

Gutenberg's press only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and understand them.

-- Peter Berger, The land of iPods and honey

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"I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written."

-- Louis Kahn, What Will Be Has Always Been