ellauri088.html on line 599: In addition, here’s a much earlier spoof of German lieder, from the British comic novel “Three Men in a Boat,” published in 1889. I think it shows just how pervasive and long-standing is the English-speaker’s resistance to the rarefied world of the German art-song. The excerpt is also very silly and probably tells you at least as much about British anti-intellectualism and complacency as it does about German over-earnestness.
ellauri115.html on line 404: Several of his philosopher friends tried to shake Hume from his complacency. Grimm, D'Alembert and Diderot all spoke from personal experience, having had a spectacular falling-out with the belligerent Rousseau in the previous decade.
ellauri146.html on line 686: started with the queerest idea conceivable, viz; that all men are born free and equal-this in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe. Every man “voted,” as they called it-that is to say, meddled with public affairs-until, at length, it was discovered that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s, and that the “Republic” (as the absurd thing was called) was without a government at all. It is related, however, that the first circumstance which disturbed, very particularly, the self-complacency of the philosophers who constructed this “Republic,” was the startling discovery that universal suffrage gave opportunity for fraudulent schemes….A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident the consequences, which were that rascality must predominate— in a word, that a republican government could never be anything but a rascally one. While the philosophers, however, were busied in blushing at their stupidity in not having foreseen these inevitable evils, and intent upon the invention of new theories, the matter was put to an abrupt issue by a fellow of the name of Mob, who took everything into his own hands and set up a despotism…. As for republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the “prairie dogs,” an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs.
ellauri161.html on line 610: In the line of the film's fire are power-crazed politicians, corporate czars and co-opted scientists peddling their convenient delusions to a crowd lulled and manipulated through news cycles aimed at achieving collective complacency and complicity. This is just too many for laughs, about 100% of the fucking Americans.
xxx/ellauri229.html on line 122: (2.) Self-righteousness. – Some, when they have devoted their set time to reading of the Word, and accomplished their prescribed portion, may be tempted to look at themselves with self-complacency. Many, I am persuaded, are living without any
5