"The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs."
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Academics from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesAcademics from RussiaPoets from RussiaPeople from St. Petersburg
Original Language: English
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"A Commencement Address" (1984), delivered at Williams College; As quoted in: Robert Inchausti (2014) Thinking through Thomas Merton. p. 110
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Brodsky
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Joseph Brodsky
1991 – 1992
Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, usually anglicized as Joseph Brodsky) (24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian-American poet, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991–1992.
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