Please curate for me 3 extremely high quality passages of one or two paragraphs (10-30 lines) from the following writers, so I can study, emulate and rewrite to improve my writing.
I am creating my own writing course by learning from some of the greatest writers in history. How do I assess who the greatest writers in history are? They were great writers but also effective writers. I admire the quality of their writing, and their ability to direct their thoughts had a big impact on human history. I will study their work, re-write it, and incorporate their own style into my writing.
- George Orwell
- Julius Caesar
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Stephen King
- James Baldwin
- Maria Popova
- Winston Churchill
- Dickens
- Aurelius
- Seneca
- James Baldwin – Go Tell it on the Mountain
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Ernest Hemingway
- Shakespeare
- Bertrand Russell
- Hemingway
- Ben Franklin
- Susan Sontag
The best economics writers
- John Maynard Keynes
- Adam Smith
- Friedrich Hayek
- Milton Friedman
- Thomas Sowell
- Mariana Mazzucato
For example, some of their great passages
Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841)
George Orwell — The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
“The English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘worldview.’ Nor is this because they are ‘practical,’ as they are so fond of claiming. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and road construction to see how little they care about efficiency. But what the English always aim at is a compromise: the most characteristic English trait is the avoidance of extremes. In the kind of sense in which it is true at all, the English are democratic not because they believe that everyone is as good as everyone else, but because they have a deep-rooted belief that every man ought to have his fair chance and that no one should enjoy unfair advantages. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this applies only to the liberty of the Englishman. A foreigner, even a friendly one, is liable to find himself outside the pale; he is not quite real. One cannot look at the common people of England without seeing that, whatever else they may be, they are not servile.”
John Maynard Keynes – Economic Consequences of the Peace, Chapter I (Paris, 1919)
“The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half-century.
We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly.
On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family.
Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British people have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realise in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where we dropped them, with this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal richer than we were before. Where we spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit to the utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We look, therefore, not only to a return to the comforts of 1914, but to an immense broadening and intensification of them. All classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less, the poor to spend more and work less.
But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is possible to be so unconscious. In continental Europe the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or “labour troubles”; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilisation.” en.wikipedia.org+9economicsnetwork.ac.uk+9nber.org+9
