The plebeian asks himself, ‘What type of person am I?’, and he seeks the answer by comparing the self he believes he is with the norms enshrined in t… - R. W. K. Paterson

Ultimately, instead of inspecting life to see what we can find to suit us, we inspect ourselves to see what we can find that fits us to receive the standardized packages in which our life-experience is going to arrive.

Endurance means that failures have to be both accepted and refused: accepted as a sign that fresh efforts now need to be made, and refused as a signal that we may now desist from effort altogether. … Courage means that the external risks and adversities we face (as distinct from or own moral and spiritual failures) are to be assessed at their true importance: that is, for the patrician, as being in themselves of no importance, as objects not of fear but of disdain.

Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists, who notoriously decline to distinguish between the value judgements men make and the moral realities about which men make these judgments, are occupationally prone to treat all value judgements, however sharply opposed, as if they were of equal merit.