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Miscellaneous Passages . . .

. . . with a little commentary:

"To consort with the crowd is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith. . . . I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings." Seneca

"Your good qualities should face inwards." Seneca

Seneca on "the flow": "When one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight."

Seneca on the saints: "Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts."

On the brain's elasticity: "We become, neurologically, what we think." Nicholas Carr

Nineteen-century missionaries ""who went into the Five Points, the poorest neighborhood in New York City, believed the Irish there to be so degraded that they dragged down the African Americans around. them." Thaddeus Russell

Re: Eminem: "Whites imitating blacks is America's oldest pastime." Thaddeus Russell

"We must come to terms with the fact that a majority of ex-slaves--field hands and house slaves, men and women--had a positive view of the institution, and many unabashedly wished to return to their slave days." Thaddeus Russell

"Economic historians have determined that on average, Northern farmers worked four hundred more hours per year than did slaves. And no group in world history worked more than industrial workers in the nineteenth-century United States." Thaddeus Russell

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