This rather short collection contains six works by William Hazlitt. The first is "The Fight" which is rather forgettable: "We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them". The second is "The Indian Jugglers" which is quite good: "Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice." The third is "On the Spirit of Monarchy," which if one switches `Tories' for `Democrats' and `Whigs' for `Republicans' yields an amazingly accurate description of the current state of affairs in American politics: "The right and the wrong are of little consequence, compared to the in and the out." The fourth is "What is the People?" and is also very good: "There is but a limited earth and a limited fertility to supply the demands both of Government and people; and what the one gains in the division of the spoil, beyond its average proportion, the other must needs go without." The fifth is "On Reason and Imagination" and is a terrific account of the human condition: "Man is (so to speak) an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told."
The sixth is "On the Pleasure of Hating" and is one of the best and most timeless screeds ever written. There are so many fantastic quotes I could pull from this short essay; here is just one: "We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects." I loved this book and highly recommend it. Some contemporary books that contain many of the same elements and same flavor are:
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
,
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
,
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
,
Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
and
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
.
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Great collection of essays and there's really not much else ...
Great collection of essays and there's really not much else I can say that others already haven't! 2004 edition pictured. Fits perfectly with my collection of more contemporary Penguin Great Ideas editions.
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Great collection of essays and there's really not much else ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2015
Great collection of essays and there's really not much else I can say that others already haven't! 2004 edition pictured. Fits perfectly with my collection of more contemporary Penguin Great Ideas editions.
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2015
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Candi
Accedir a literatura en anglès en format econòmic
Reviewed in Spain on October 1, 2023Malcolm James
A great model for modern writers who want to write with intelligence at the highest level that prose can achieve.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 11, 2013