biographer

hypocrisy

journalist

occupation / innovator as

nationality

American

scientific organization

American Academy of Arts and Letters

is a professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and the money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.

is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by reconciling the irreconcilable human needs for order (strict morality) and pleasure (anarchic permissiveness).

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure. Janet Malcolm

is necessarily a kind of morally indefensible confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Janet MalcolmThinkers

Janet Malcolm