“The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in profits. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. And Wall Street C.E.O.s—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)
“Government gets used to protect those who have already made it. That becomes the game. And so we had the big crash and I thought, O.K.! We tested the alternative theory. Cut taxes, reduce regulations and financial services, and see what happens to the economy. We ran a thirty-year test on that and it was a disaster.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to the market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)
“There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Psychology” (trans. Hollingdale)
“The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business, and especially with those of clerking. What young man is by nature diligent, sober, and regular in his habits? Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth? Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring? One in ten thousand, perhaps. Bur for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time,’ one will be allowed to get on with living. The situation is the most commonplace in the world. I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard the ‘social order’: they know that, short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires.” – R. J. Hollingdale, Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms
“The most important predictor of obesity remains income level. Fast-food companies are dropping obscene amounts on advertising in low-income communities of color, and are targeting children. African-American kids see at least 50 percent more fast-food ads than do white children their age. A full 25 percent of all Spanish-language fast-food advertising in the U.S. is from McDonalds, and the average Latino will see about 290 McDonalds ads a year. In 2006, 9 percent of Upper East Side residents were obese, compared with 21 percent and 30 percent in East and Central Harlem and North and Central Brooklyn, two of the poorest stretches of New York City. Only 5 percent of Upper East Side residents had diabetes, compared to 10 percent and 15 percent in Harlem and Brooklyn. In these neighborhoods, between 1985 and 2000, the cost of fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent while the price of junk food and soft drinks decreased by 15 percent and 25 percent respectively.” – Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “Seeing Red”
“Capitalism is itself a kind of social technology, one capable of organizing and managing a massive and complex division of labor without concentrating power over the system at any one point. But it is a technology that is much better suited to some tasks than others. When maximizing the output of commodities with the least input of human labor is posed as society’s main problem, capitalism’s defenders can point to it as an historically unsurpassed technology for this purpose.
“If, however, the main problem is to maintain the ability of the Earth to support an advanced civilization, and to ensure that the bounty of that civilization is shared out equitably, then the situation looks quite different. Since the system responds only to price signals, internalizing the externalities of ecological degradation entails an unceasing campaign of enclosures and commodification, in which every aspect of the natural world must be parceled up into pieces of private property, from carbon credits to fishing rights. And this same reliance on prices ensures that legitimacy of a person’s desires will always be equated with the money at their disposal, and the machine will reproduce a world that caters to the whims of rich countries and rich people. This is ever more of a problem when wage work is still the normal way of making a living, and yet less and less labor is actually required in production.” – Peter Frase, “Sowing Scarcity”
“Most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders, and my guess is that most people who think they are doing whatever important thing they are doing are making binders. The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work.” — Elizabeth Wurzel, from The Cut
“If it is to remain something meaningful, philosophy does not have to limit itself to describing things, it has to make things happen, it has to effectuate a change. That’s why the locus of philosophy, the place where it dwells, is not the books, nor the academic papers, but the body of the philosopher. Philosophy does not exist properly unless it is embodied in a human being; in a sense, philosophy is word become flesh.” – Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy as an Art of Living” (emphases in original)
“It is a dangerous thing to suddenly deprive a man of hope–he can turn violent. It is important to kill hope slowly, so that the loser has time to adjust unconsciously to the loss.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark (emphasis in original)
“Neither goodness nor generosity nor courtesy can exist, any more than friendship can, if they are not sought of and for themselves, but are cultivated only for the sake of sensual pleasure or personal advantage.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood. In childhood animals are all around us, and then we throw them out. In childhood they’re everywhere, the stuff of our stories and our art and our songs, of our clothes and blankets, of toys and games. Then in adulthood they’re distant symbols or objects. They’re rudely ejected from our domain. They’re frivolous or infantile, suddenly. They’re what we eat or maybe pets. Sometimes they’re what we kill. But this makes no sense. This impoverishes our imaginations. When we turn away from animals as though they’re only childish things, we make our world colder and more narrow. We rob ourselves of beauty and understanding. We rob ourselves of the capacity for empathy.” – Lydia Millet (interviewed by Morten Hoi Jensen in Bookforum)
“When most people leave school they have to live by work which can’t be liked for its own sake and whose practical application is outside their grasp. Unless they learn to work obediently because they’re told to, and for no other reason, they’ll be unfit for human society.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark
“A man once said in Auschwitz that indifference is the greatest sin of the 20th Century. Well, I think it is the greatest sin of the 21st Century as well. We need to shake off this indifference, the destructive tolerance of evil.” – Jim Caviezel, quoted in the production notes for The Stoning of Soraya M.
“Social media, as well as the pervasiveness of cameras and other surveillance apparatuses, have the potential to persecute anyone as though they are an undeserving celebrity due for a takedown. In a world where motion-sensitive cameras lie in wait to transmit images of your walking down the street in real time to online observers for judgment, where facial- recognition technology can durably attach all the insults to your name, where privacy is increasingly interpreted as secrecy and the mere procedures of exposing anyone are seen as blows against power, we are all subject to unexpected and unwanted scrutiny. Yet at the same time, in a social environment that’s increasingly congested by transparency and competing and unceasing claims for recognition, we must clamor for the attention we do want and find ingenious (if not exploitive) ways to get it. Not only are we all under surveillance but we are compelled to then justify why we’re being watched. This stems from social media’s seemingly objective measures of individual reputation and influence (Klout is merely the most egregious of these), which we ‘deserve’ by being active online — turning our thoughts, opinions, friends, and relations into useful marketing data. Social media provide the infrastructure for the economic mobilization of the personality, in which our efforts to ‘be ourselves’ must confirm themselves by being demonstratively productive.” – Rob Horning, “Living in Microfame”
“A good doctor does not carry a remedy to his patient, he lets the patient teach him what the remedy is.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark
“My definition of art is very straightforward: Art is what is sold as art, and that’s it. When someone buys something, believing he or she is buying art, then it is art. If you pay for something because you think it’s art, you’re basically creating art: the buyer creates art, not the artist. This is what’s going on in the art world, although they won’t tell you that—they don’t believe in art, but they do believe in selling art.” – Slovenian Damien Hirst (interviewed by Jesse Darling in “Being Damien Hirst” (emphases in the original)
“Every new generation of artists is faced with the task of originating new forms of work that fall outside the margins of established commodity. In other words, to create work that is uncommodifiable, though it will not remain so for long. This is the cycle, the dance, the lie at the heart of the avant-garde, and everyone knows it. As the art market sets crunchily to work figuring out how to sell the unsaleable, the best or cutest or savviest of the new generation are called to join in the carousel or production line, churning out their visionary, uncommodifiable commodities, which have acquired in the meantime a price tag in accordance to their very resistance to commodity status, their rareness, their avant-gardiness. Avant-garde simply means as yet unsold (though we’re working on it); ‘outsider’ art denotes that-for-which-we-can-see-no-buyer.” – Jesse Darling, “Being Damien Hirst”
“Would that it could always be so! No one richer, none poorer, than his fellow; no coveting the other’s goods; no envy; no greedy grasping for more than one’s fair share of that given for all. True it is, I reflected, that money is the root of all evil, the curse of our civilization, seeing that it is the instrument which frail mortals use to take unjust advantages. What a difference those few days when there was no money, or when money had no value! Christ walked the ruined city and reigned over a willing people.” – Charles B. Sedgwick, “The Fall of San Francisco”
“As for property, it is a duty to make money, but only by honourable means; it is a duty also to save it and increase it by care and thrift.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“Those whose office it is to look after the interests of the state will refrain from that form of liberality which robs one man to enrich another. Above all, they will use their best endeavours that everyone shall be protected in the possession of his own property by the fair administration of the law and the courts, that the poorer classes shall not be oppressed because of their helplessness, and that envy shall not stand in the way of the rich, to prevent them from keeping or recovering possession of what justly belongs to them.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“We must take measures that there shall be no indebtedness of a nature to endanger the public safety. It is a menace that can be averted in many ways; but should a serious debt be incurred, we are not to allow the rich to lose their property, while the debtors profit by what is their neighbour’s. For there is nothing that upholds a government more powerfully than its credit; and it can have no credit, unless the payment of debts is enforced by law.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“It is the peculiar function of the state and the city to guarantee to every man the free and undisturbed control of his own particular property.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“We have enough objects of charity at home, and it is our duty to take care of our own poor and our own suffering, before we go abroad to intermeddle with other people’s business.” – Stephen A. Douglas, Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas
“The moral sense of to-day is demoralized and depraved by our worship of wealth. Of what concern to any one of us is the size of another man’s fortune? It is, perhaps, an advantage to its possessor; but not always even that. But suppose it is; he may, to be sure, have more money to spend; but how is he any the better man for that? Still, if he is a good man, as well as a rich one, let not his riches be a hindrance to his being aided, if only they are not the motive to it; but in conferring favours our decision should depend entirely upon a man’s character, not on his wealth. The supreme rule, then, in the matter of kindnesses to be rendered by personal service is never to take up a case in opposition to the right nor in defence of the wrong. For the foundation of enduring reputation and fame is justice, and without justice there can be nothing worthy of praise.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“Now in rendering helpful service to people, we usually consider either their character or their circumstances. And so it is an easy remark, and one commonly made, to say that in investing kindnesses we look not to people’s outward circumstances, but to their character. The phrase is admirable! But who is there, pray, that does not in performing a service set the favour of a rich and influential man above the cause of a poor, though most worthy, person? For, as a rule, our will is more inclined to the one from whom we expect a prompter and speedier return. But we should observe more carefully how the matter really stands: the poor man of whom we spoke cannot return a favour in kind, of course, but if he is a good man he can do it at least in thankfulness of heart.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“It will, moreover, befit a gentleman to be at the same time liberal in giving and not inconsiderate in exacting his dues, but in every business relation — in buying or selling, in hiring or letting, in relations arising out of adjoining houses and lands — to be fair, reasonable, often freely yielding much of his own right, and keeping out of litigation as far as his interests will permit and perhaps even a little farther. For it is not only generous occasionally to abate a little of one’s rightful claims, but it is sometimes even advantageous. We should, however, have a care for our personal property, for it is discreditable to let it run through our fingers; but we must guard it in such a way that there shall be no suspicion of meanness or avarice. For the greatest privilege of wealth is, beyond all peradventure, the opportunity it affords for doing good, without sacrificing one’s fortune.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“Those who propose to take charge of the affairs of government should not fail to remember two of Plato’s rules: first, to keep the good of the people so clearly in view that regardless of their own interests they will make their every action conform to that; second, to care for the welfare of the whole body politic and not in serving the interests of some one party to betray the rest. For the administration of the government, like the office of a trustee, must be conducted for the benefit of those entrusted to one’s care, not of those to whom it is entrusted. Now, those who care for the interests of a part of the citizens and neglect another part, introduce into the civil service a dangerous element — dissension and party strife. The result is that some are found to be loyal supporters of the democratic, others of the aristocratic party, and few of the nation as a whole. As a result of this party spirit bitter strife arose at Athens, and in our own country not only dissensions but also disastrous civil wars broke out.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“Beware of ambition for wealth; for there is nothing so characteristic of narrowness and littleness of soul as the love of riches; and there is nothing more honourable and noble than to be indifferent to money, if one does not possess it, and to devote it to beneficence and liberality, if one does possess it.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“We must, of course, never be guilty of seeming cowardly and craven in our avoidance of danger; but we must also beware of exposing ourselves to danger needlessly. Nothing can be more foolhardy than that. Accordingly, in encountering danger we should do as doctors do in their practice: in light cases of illness they give mild treatment; in cases of dangerous sickness they are compelled to apply hazardous and even desperate remedies. It is, therefore, only a madman who, in a calm, would pray for a storm; a wise man’s way is, when the storm does come, to withstand it with all the means at his command, and especially, when the advantages to be expected in case of a successful issue are greater than the hazards of the struggle. The dangers attending great affairs of state fall sometimes upon those who undertake them, sometimes upon the state. In carrying out such enterprises, some run the risk of losing their lives, others their reputation and the good-will of their fellow-citizens. It is our duty, then, to be more ready to endanger our own than the public welfare and to hazard honour and glory more readily than other advantages.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)