One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
Roger ScrutonRead
The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.
Interpretation
True immigration issues can be resolved by fostering worldwide prosperity and freedom.
Roger Scruton's quote emphasizes that the root causes of immigration problems stem from lack of prosperity and freedom in certain regions. By improving economic conditions and ensuring individual liberties globally, the motivation for people to migrate would diminish, creating a more balanced and stable society.
In practice
During a conference on global development, one might quote Scruton to emphasize the importance of economic stability.
One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
Every particle of the world is a mirror. In each atom blazes forth the light of a thousand suns. Open the heart of a raindrop and you will find a hundred oceans. In a grain of sand lies the seed of a thousand beings.
The world is yourself pushed out. Ask yourself what you want and then give it to yourself! Do not question how it will come about; just go your way knowing that the evidence of what you have done must appear, and it will.
Fair... You'd be amazed how often I hear that word, Frank Zhang,and how meaningless it is. Is it fair your life will burn so short and bright? Was it fair when I guided your mother to the Underworld? No, not fair. And yet it was her time. There is no fairness in Death. If you free me, I will do my duty.
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.
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