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We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.

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Christine Jennings

They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great. ' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.

America, Encounter, Imagine, Past, People
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Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.

1830S, Book, Fun, Icaria, Uniquely, Writing

Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming

Build, Community, Humans, People, Thinking

The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are the same. Through slightly different interpretations, they all think the same thing is going to happen, that the Earth is going to be perfected and that humans are going to do the work of perfecting it.

Different, Happen, Perfecting, Religious, Same, Thinking

That to me was one of the most exciting, and weird puzzles of this book: how are the most religious people and the least religious people of their time all drawn to very similar visions of utopia?

Book, Drawn, People, Religious, Visions

I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.

Impact, Separated, Time, War, Wider, Worry
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