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Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and...

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding...

It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave...

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and...

We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us,...

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

To evoke another great phrase of the American revolutionary heritage — widely though inconclusively attributed to Thomas Jefferson — the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Such a phrase is merely trite, however, unless we...