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I have been reading Madame Roland's memoirs and have come to the conclusion that she was a very over-rated woman; snobbish, vain, sentimental, envious — rather a German type. Her last days before her execution were spent in chronicling petty social snubs or triumphs of many years back. She was a democrat chiefly from envy of the noblesse.
--
Bertrand Russell, in a letter to his brother Frank, 1918.

 

Madame Roland (Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platiere)

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This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning—not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.

 

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Roland the headless Thompson gunner,
Norway's bravest son.
Time, time, time
For another peaceful war.
But time stands still for Roland
'Til he evens up the score.
They can still see his headless body stalking through the night
In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun;
In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun.

 

Warren Zevon