“Are you speaking the language, or is it speaking you?” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Before Europe”
Category: History
“If we cannot help but blame others for things that are beyond their control, this may be because wretchedness is our basic condition, as inevitable as it is blameworthy, and only an ideology—such as the one that has reigned throughout modernity—that stresses our earthly perfectibility will place the wretched in the earthly purgatories of rehab clinics and ‘correctional institutions’ and psychiatric outpatient clinics, where in each case the purported goal is to purge the wretchedness right out of a person.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“History is not Tragedy. To understand historical reality, it is sometimes necessary not to know the outcome.” – Pierre Vidal-Naquet (quoted by Julian Jackson in France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (emphasis in original))
“As long as people feel cheated, bored, harassed, endangered, or betrayed at work, sabotage will be used as a direct method of achieving job satisfaction – the kind that never has to get the bosses’ approval.” – Martin Sprouse, Sabotage in the American Workplace
“There was a movement on our right. Probably a scout. We let him pass. Another passed even closer. Then a compact mass of men came within our sights on the scarp and the beach below. ‘Give it to them, Chae,’ I whispered, and as he opened up, I started chucking grenades as fast as I could. It was short. They went down like tenpins, and those that didn’t scurried for cover under the scarp.
It was all we could do. I placed a grenade on the breech of the gun and we raced away through our familiar camp area. We hadn’t gone twenty yards when we heard high-pitched scream behind us that brought us to a stunned halt. Lim. That was Lim. We both recognized her voice, even in terror. Back we went now, crouching and beating toward the beach from where the scream had come.
We snaked over the scarp. The beach was free of Reds. They’d taken to the high ground in pursuit of us, but a white patch half hung over the scarp ahead. Chae was there before me. It was Lim. Blood covered her face and bare breasts. Her small shoulder jacket had been jerked off in tossing her aside. The side of her head had been caved in by a single blow, probably from a rifle.
‘Come, Chae, we must get out of here,’ I said as gently as possible, but with urgency.
‘No, Taicho-san, leave me. She must be taken care of. I won’t leave her to the Red dogs. I’m going with her.’ His voice was coarse with passion and hatred.
‘You can do nothing, Chae,’ I said, misunderstanding the implication. ‘Come. If you wish, we’ll take her with us,’ and I moved forward to pick her up. He brushed me aside and gave me a shove that threw me down to the beach. Before I could recover my feet, a jagged explosion rent the air and felled me again. Chae had blown himself to bits with a grenade.
I picked myself up, cursing at the things love made people do, and headed for the mudflat.” – Commander Eugene Franklin Clark, USN, The Secrets of Inchon
“My eyes grew accustomed to the dim glow of the embers and I studied the faces about us. The sunken cheeks and bony forearms and hands that extended out of long white sleeves showed that the grim specter of malnutrition was present. The normally healthy brown pigmentation of the skin had given way to a sickly chalklike yellow, which effect was aggravated by a loosening of the skin as the stored-up fat tissue burned away. I had seen this before many times, and although it now didn’t upset me as at first, still I couldn’t control an involuntary shudder at its awful presence. As visual evidence of the utter horror of war, I had yet to decide which was the worse to look upon—death or famine.” – Commander Eugene Franklin Clark, USN, The Secrets of Inchon
“It is worth attention, that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness, than any of their neighbours.” – Bishop Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
“But if there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is impossible to educate for this end, impossible to teach the world how to die away from its achieved, nullified form. The autumn must take place in every individual soul, as well as in all the people, all must die, individually and socially. But education is a process of striving to a new, unanimous being, a whole organic form. But when winter has set in, when the frosts are strangling the leaves off the trees and the birds are silent knots of darkness, how can there be a unanimous movement towards a whole summer of fluorescence? There can be none of this, only submission to the death of this nature, in the winter that has come upon mankind, and a cherishing of the unknown that is unknown for many a day yet, buds that may not open till a far off season comes, when the season of death has passed away.” – D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
“Modernity has not turned out altogether well. To the pioneers of Enlightenment, it appeared that false certainties and artificial hierarchies were the chief obstacles to general happiness. To many the suspicion has by now occurred that there are no true certainties and no natural hierarchies, yet also that individual and social well-being require some certainties, some hierarchies. The rapid increase in mobility and choice, in sheer volume of stimuli that followed the erosion of traditional ways of life and thought has taxed, and occasionally overwhelmed, nearly every modern man or woman. This no longer seems, even to the most optimistic partisans of modernity, merely a phenomenon of transition. It may be that just as in any generation there are broad limits to physical and intellectual development, so also there are psychological limits, which likewise alter slowly. ‘Human nature,’ in short, though in an empirical rather than a metaphysical sense; not eternal and immutable, but with enough continuity – inertia, to be precise – to generate illusions of essence and a need for roots.” – George Scialabba, “Demos and Sophia: Not a Love Story”
“The culture of professionalism and expertise, the bureaucratization of opinion and taste, are not merely mechanisms of social control or a failure of nerve. They are also in part a response to genuine intellectual progress. There’s more to know now than in the ‘30s, and more people have joined the conversation. Perhaps the disappearance of the public intellectual and the eclipse of the classical ideals of wisdom as catholicity of understanding and of citizenship as the capacity to discuss all public affairs are evidences of cultural maturity. Intellectual wholeness is an almost irresistibly attractive ideal; but nowadays too determined a pursuit of it must end in fragmentation and superficiality.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope”
“Time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“We shall all no doubt be wise after the event; we study history that we may be wise before the event.” – John Robert Seeley (quoted by Duncan Bell in “John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire”)