“It’s a favorite myth in our culture that hardship makes you a better person, that it is merely the grindstone on which your essence is refined and polished. But the truth is that scarcity, depression, thwarted ambition, and suffering most often leaves the person a little twisted. That is the territory where mean drunks and tyrannical bastards come from.” – Jessa Crispin, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin”
Author: Tetman Callis
“Let’s say, for a moment, that the character of a city has an effect on its inhabitants, and that it sets the frequency on which it calls out to the migratory. People who are tuned a certain way will heed the call almost without knowing why. Thinking that they’ve chosen this city, they’ll never know that the city chose them. Let’s say, for a moment, that the literal situation of a city can leak out into the metaphorical realm. That the city is the vessel and we are all merely beings of differing viscosity, slowly taking on the shape of that into which we are poured.” – Jessa Crispin, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin”
“I don’t see how people don’t write about sex. And also, when are you not writing about sex?” — Eileen Myles (quoted by Jen Graves in “Slog,” November 16, 2012)
“running and fucking
help clear the head
if only I could
fuck and run forever”
— Dan Grace, “The Solution to All Our Ills”
“We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and
unemployment;
• The right to a good education.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Second Bill of Rights,” January 11, 1944
“Primitive – and not so primitive – peoples commonly attempt to bargain with nature,
through prayer, through sacrifice or through ritual persuasion. In doing so they are explicitly adopting a social model, expecting nature to participate in a transaction. But nature will not transact with men; she goes her own way regardless – while her would-be interlocutors feel grateful or feel slighted as the case befits.” – Nicholas Humphrey, “The social function of intellect” (emphasis in original)
“It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller)
“If you cut infinity in half, each half is still infinite.” – Alan Lightman, “ ‘It Seems That I Know How the Universe Originated’ “
“Judges must keep in mind that poverty is not a crime; it is a condition, and every day presents a struggle for the poor to survive, to cope, to get by until tomorrow. When one is poor, drifting into petty crime can become an option, despite its undeniable risks.” – Justice Michael B. Hyman, The People of the State of Illinois v. Harley Busse (Illinois Appellate Court, First District, December 17, 2016)
“If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law”
“What makes robbers bold but too much lenity?” – William Shakespeare, King Henry VI. Third Part
“It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality necessarily makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves certitude. It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of danger and disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to. The time comes, if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with fatigue, and we seize in a great healing wave of release some doctrine that can be immediately translated into action.” – Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals”
“Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher synthesis or adjustment, or else in a
reversion to more primitive ideas which have been outgrown but to which we drop
when jolted out of our attained position.” – Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals”
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” – George Harrison, “Any Road”
“In a war undertaken for any object, even if that object be the possession of a particular territory or position, an attack directly upon the place coveted may not be, from the military point of view, the best means of obtaining it. The end upon which the military operations are directed may therefore be other than the object which the belligerent government wishes to obtain, and it has received a name of its own, — the objective. In the critical consideration of any war it is necessary, first, to put clearly before the student’s eye the objects desired by each belligerent; then, to consider whether the objective chosen is the most likely, in case of success, to compass those objects ; and finally, to study the merits or faults of the various movements by which the objective is approached. The minuteness with which such an examination is conducted will depend upon the extent of the work which the inquirer proposes to himself; but it will generally conduce to clearness if an outline, giving only the main features unencumbered by detail, should precede a more exhaustive discussion. When such principal lines are thoroughly grasped, details are easily referred to them, and fall into place.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“Sophrosyne, which to the Greeks was an ideal second to none in importance, is not among our ideals. We have lost the conception of it. Enough is said about it in Greek literature for us to be able to describe it in some fashion, but we cannot give it a name. It was the spirit behind the two great Delphic sayings, ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing in excess.’ Arrogance, insolent self-assertion, was the quality most detested by the Greeks. Sophosyne was the exact opposite. It meant accepting the bounds which excellence lays down for human nature, restraining impulses to unrestricted freedom, to all excess, obeying the inner laws of harmony and proportion.” – Benjamin Jowett, “Introduction to Plato’s Charmides”
“The pretzel is said to have been invented almost fourteen hundred years ago in a monastery in southern France where a monk frugally twisted leftover scraps of dough into a shape like that of arms folded in prayer, with the three openings representing the Trinity.” – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals
“The result of planting apple seeds is a series of trees whose fruit is unpredictable.” – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals
“I would love to see all exotic wildlife in zoos allowed to live out their lives in peace and comfort and then not be replaced. Instead, have the zoos and aquariums be places where people – especially children – go to interact with animals that actually like us and want to be around us and not have to be on medication to deal with their lives behind the glass or bars. There are lots of animals who enjoy us, and I think children and adults would have a more meaningful experience interacting with animals who are interested in us.” – Laurel Braitman (interviewed by Malcolm Harris in The New Inquiry, September 2012)
“Good troops have often made amends for bad generalship; but in the end the better leader will prevail.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“Seaports should defend themselves; the sphere of the fleet is on the open sea, its object offence rather than defence, its objective the enemy’s shipping wherever it can be found.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“No well ordered society can leave to the individuals an absolute right to make final decisions, unassailable by the State, as to everything they will or will not do.” – Justice Hugo Lafayette Black and Justice William Orville Douglas, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
“Free public education, if faithful to the ideal of secular instruction and political neutrality, will not be partisan or enemy of any class, creed, party, or faction.” – Chief Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
“What do you want to see come into the world? How can you bring it into the world today, even just a little bit?” — Bud Smith, “Four Memories of Giancarlo DiTrapano”
“Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Writers can be only so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Judgment is to be made of actions according to the times in which they were performed. The conduct of a wise politician is ever suited to the present posture of affairs; often by foregoing a part he saves the whole, and by yielding in a small matter secures a greater.” – “Comparison of Poplicola with Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)
“The remission of debts was peculiar to Solon; it was his great means for confirming the citizens’ liberty; for a mere law to give all men equal rights is but useless, if the poor must sacrifice those rights to their debts, and, in the very seats and sanctuaries of equality, the courts of justice, the offices of state, and the public discussions, be more than anywhere at the beck and bidding of the rich. A yet more extraordinary success was, that, although usually civil violence is caused by any remission of debts, upon this one occasion this dangerous but powerful remedy actually put an end to civil violence already existing,” – “Comparison of Poplicola with Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)
“A people always minds its rulers best
When it is neither humored nor oppressed.”
– “Comparison of Poplicola with Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)