Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltieris an American writer, critic, amateur philosopher and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of The New Republic. He is currently the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor and critic at The Atlantic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 June 1952
CountryUnited States of America
call effort likes man meant nice personnel sort summon
The effort was to summon to the bosoms of her personnel the sort of man that Barrows likes to call "nice." Nice meant rich.
media money
Incorruptibility by money is the old story, ... Now it's incorruptibility by media.
ability admire known manipulate somebody talent
Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery.
spending
I was not interested in spending 10 years in the culture wars.
character google age
Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
deeds bliss certainty
No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.
attitude identity jew
American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.
democracy citizens delinquents
A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy,
velocity forgotten volume
The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,
blue boston drunk
The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.
language-and-power language needed
There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
world invited
The world invited me many places.
book philosophical reflection
Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it.
commitment what-matters obsession
What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.