| Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to fritter these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. |
Archive for the ‘Favorite Quotations’ Category
Julian Assange on the conduct of life
June 25, 2024
A quote on war and revolution
March 21, 2024Wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is.
Revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourselves.
==Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte (probably falsely)
Seneca the Stoic on the good life
March 17, 2024John Stuart Mill on eccentricity
February 1, 2024In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.
That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
Bible verse for today
January 28, 2024You shall not oppress or afflict strangers or foreigners in your land, for you were once foreigners residing in the land of Egypt. You shall not oppress or deprive any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely listen to their cry. My wrath will rise up, and I will visit you with destruction. Then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.
==Exodus 22:21-23
Bertrand Russell on how to grow old
December 14, 2023Bertrand Russell was 72 when he wrote this essay in 1945, and he lived to be 97. As for myself, today is my 87th birthday..
“How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell
In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully.
Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the flower of his youth at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three grandparents all lived to be over eighty.
Of remoter ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off. A great-grandmother of mine, who was a friend of Gibbon, lived to the age of ninety-two, and to her last day remained a terror to all her descendants.
My maternal grandmother, after having nine children who survived, one who died in infancy, and many miscarriages, as soon as she became a widow devoted herself to women’s higher education. She was one of the founders of Girton College, and worked hard at opening the medical profession to women.
She used to tell of how she met in Italy an elderly gentleman who was looking very sad. She asked him why he was so melancholy and he said that he had just parted from his two grandchildren. ‘Good gracious,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have seventy-two grandchildren, and if I were sad each time I parted from one of them, I should have a miserable existence!’ ‘Madre snaturale!,’ he replied.
But speaking as one of the seventy-two, I prefer her recipe. After the age of eighty she found she had some difficulty in getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3 a.m. in reading popular science. I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was growing old.
This, I think, is the proper recipe for remaining young. If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective, you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.
As regards health, I have nothing useful to say as I have little experience of illness. I eat and drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake. I never do anything whatever on the ground that it is good for health, though in actual fact the things I like doing are mostly wholesome.
Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age. One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead.
One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done. This is not always easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight.
Mental clarity in an age of propaganda
November 5, 2023It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.
He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
==Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any practical result whatsoever, you’ve beaten them.
==George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
(Hat tip to Jesse’s Cafe Americain)
Moral clarity in an age of atrocity
October 29, 2023… … I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.
However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.
Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.
Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
==C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
(Hat tip to Jesse’s Cafe Americain)
Philip K. Dick on the authentic human being
August 13, 2023
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds. but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
I found this quote in an essay called I’m Not Really Enjoying the Show by Charles Hugh Smith.
It was taken from an essay called How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick.
I liked both essays. I’m not enjoying the show, either.
Hat tip for the first link to my friend Steve from Texas.
Twitter moderators take note
December 8, 2022
Everyday religion (or socialism)
June 5, 2022
Obedience and rebellion
July 28, 2021When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
==C.P. Snow
Every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection….If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody.
==Etienne de la Boetie
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
==Howard Zinn
E. B. White on “the meaning of democracy”
July 4, 2021E.B. White wrote the following in the Notes & Comments section of The New Yorker on July 3, 1943.
We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is.
It is the line that forms on the right.
It is the don’t in don’t shove.
It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
Democracy is a letter to the editor.
Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.
It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.
It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.
Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
Source: E. B. White in The New Yorker
D.H. Lawrence on showing your feelings
November 15, 2020The feelings I don’t have, I don’t have.
The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don’t have.
The feelings you would like both of us to have, we neither of us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they’ve got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven’t got them.
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all, you’d better abandon all ideas of feelings altogether.
==D.H. Lawrence
Ben Carlson’s three rules to live by
October 17, 2020There are 3 rules that I live by:
(1) Never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city.
(2) Never get behind a minivan in the drive-through lane.
(3) Never take personal finance advice from billionaires.
Source: A Wealth of Commom Sense
The violent George Floyd protests will backfire
August 27, 2020Civilization is not so stable that it could not be easily broken up; and a condition of lawless violence is not one out of which any good thing is likely to emerge. For this reason revolutionary violence in a democracy is infinitely dangerous. [==Bertrand Russell, in 1922]
A protest movement accompanied by vandalism, looting and mob violence will not persuade the public to de-fund the police or impose restrictions on them.
I believe the violence accompanying the George Floyd protests is worse than being generally reported. The destruction caused in the name of George Floyd will not be balanced by any public good.
Instead it will make the re-election of Donald Trump and the Republicans more likely.
News reports say the protests are “mostly nonviolent.” I am willing to believe that most of the protest demonstrations are non-violent and most people taking part in demonstrations are non-violent. But this doesn’t matter.
If you have a crowd of 200 protesters, and 10 of them throw brickbats at the police and two of them throw gasoline bombs, it is not a non-violent protest—especially if the rest of the group refuses to disassociate themselves from the brick and bomb throwers.
This is why the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. exercised such tight control over the demonstrations he led. He did not want anything to happen that interfered with his objective. Malcolm X differed from Dr. King in many ways, but he, too, insisted on discipline among his followers.
I am an elderly tax-paying, law-abiding, middle-class homeowner. I am not a revolutionary. I do not condone vandalism, looting or mob violence.
But I know enough of history to know that violent and terrorist movements have sometimes brought about social change. This requires a structured organization that is capable of taking power or of negotiating a set of demands and keeping its side of the bargain. The BLM movement does not have such a structure.
Life is a mystery
August 4, 2020
For more like this, click on Zen Pencils.
The lives that don’t matter
May 24, 2020In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. (George Orwell, 1946)
The War Nerd: How Many Dead Yemeni Nobodies Does It Take to Equal One Washington Post Contributor?
A thought for our time
April 4, 2020
Edgar Allen Poe on procrastination
February 12, 2020
You can find more cartoons like this by clicking on Zen Pencils.
Michael Bloomberg as a presidential candidate
February 7, 2020
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg’s emergence as a major Democratic presidential candidate reminds me of a saying attributed to Harry Truman.
If you run a Republican against a Republican, the [real] Republican will win every time.
LINKS
Michael Bloomberg Wikipedia page.
A Republican Plutocrat Tries to Buy the Democratic Nomination by Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs [Added 2/9/2020] This says it all.
Michael Bloomberg’s Right-Wing Views on Foreign Policy by Mehdi Hasan for The Intercept.
Mike Bloomberg’s $ymbiotic Relationship With NY’s GOP: ‘We Agreed With Him on So Many Issues’ by Ross Barkan for Gothamist.
Bloomberg Has a History of Donating to Republicans—Including in 2018 by Bobby Cuza for Spectrum News NY1
‘…something in everyone that waits and listens’
January 5, 2020
The Rev. Howard Thurman (1899-1981) was a Christian theologian, an admirer of Gandhi and a mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Ukrainegate situation summarized
November 28, 2019We now have, in essence, the two sides investigating each other for the crime of having investigated each other
Source: Pete’s Politics and Variety
Update of the famous ‘they came for’ quote
October 31, 2019There’s a famous quote attributed to a German pastor about the failure of respectable people to resist the Nazis.
- First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist.
- Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
- Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew.
- Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
Caitlin Johnstone, noting the silence of the mainstream press about the arrest of left-wing reporter Max Blumenthal, updated the quote for our time.
- First they came for Assange, and I did not speak out, because I was a mainstream western journalist with no intention of ever upsetting the powerful.
- Then they came for Blumenthal, and I did not speak out, because I was a mainstream western journalist with no intention of ever upsetting the powerful.
- Then they came for all the other dissident journalists, and I did not speak out, because I will never be a dissident journalist.
- They never came for me, because I have chosen to serve power.
LINK
Mainstream Journalists Who Refuse To Defend Dissident Journalists Are Worshippers Of Power by Caitlin Johnstone.
Max Blumenthal Arrest Exposes Hypocrisy of Western Media and Human Rights NGOs by Joe Emensberger for Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) [Added 11/1/2019]
Trump, the Kurds and the forever wars
October 9, 2019
Kurds protest Trump troop withdrawal plan (Getty Images)
Getting into is easier than getting out of.
(Old saying)
If something cannot go on forever, someday it will stop.
(Stein’s Law)
We can endure neither our disorders nor the cures for them.
(Livy, History of Rome)
One of the promises made by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign was to wind down U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Every time he tries to keep this promise, he gets so much resistance from war hawks in Congress and inside his administration that he backs down.
Not that President Trump is a lover of peace. His preferred method of waging war is to try to starve other nations into submission through economic sanctions, as with Venezuela and Iran. Economic war is real war, and produces real suffering, and creates its own type of danger of blowback.
Nor is troop withdrawal without adverse consequences. Pulling American troops out of Syria will leave U.S. allies in Kurdistan open to attacks by Turks and by the Assad government, not to mention a possibly revived Islamic State (ISIS).
Donald Trump, in his usual thoughtless way, forgot about the Kurds when he announced the Syrian troop withdrawal and tweeted a lot of silly things when he was reminded of them. I have no idea what happens next.
I try to free myself of the habit of seeing foreign conflicts as a fight between good guys and bad guys. But I can’t help rooting for the Kurds. They practice religious tolerance. They don’t massacre civilians. The Kurdish community in Rojava is attempting a radical experiment in democracy. If somebody smarter than me has a plan for guaranteeing safety for the Kurds, I would be all for it.
I think it was Daniel Ellsberg who said that the American goal in Vietnam after 1965 was to postpone defeat until after the next election. I don’t see any purpose in keeping troops in the Middle East or Afghanistan other than postponing admission of defeat until after the next election.
As in Vietnam, withdrawal will result in death and misery for many, especially for those who supported U.S. forces. But withdrawal at some point is inevitable. The only question is how to minimize the harm. It would take a wiser and braver statesman than Donald Trump to answer that question.
Update. It appears that President Trump doesn’t intend to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria—only to move them out of the way of the Turkish forces moving into the Kurdish-held areas.
LINKS
Damned if we do.
Eight Times the U.S. Has Betrayed the Kurds by Jon Schwartz for The Intercept.
In which I try to make some sense of Donald Trump’s Middle East policy by Kevin Drum for Mother Jones.
Not Just Ethnicity: Turkey v. Kurds and the Great Divide Over Political Islam and the Secular Left by Juan Cole for Informed Comment [Added 10/10/2019]
The Annihilation of Rojava by Djene Bajalan and Michael Brooks for Jacobin. [Added 10/10/2019]
Damned if we don’t.
Is Trump At Last Ending Our Endless Wars? by Patrick J. Buchanan.
Trump Pulling U.S. Forces Out of Syria? by Kit Knightly for Off-Guardian.
America Doesn’t Belong in Syria by Doug Bandow for The American Conservative. [Added 10/10/2019]
Why the Syrian Kurds Aren’t Necessarily Out Friends by Scott Ritter for The American Conservative. [Added 10/13/2019]
Phil Ebersole's Blog 