Smith's sobering warning that when a society admires wealth and power for their own sake, it breeds servility and undermines freedom.
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Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.
bell hooks
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is an affront.
Franz Kafka — Diaries
China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That's the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about.
Noah Smith