“Litigation is not a game. It is the time-honored method of seeking the truth, finding the truth, and doing justice.” – Judge Roslyn O. Silver, United States District Court for the District of Arizona, Haeger v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (2012)
“Shattering those who answer innocently, is the tyrant’s way of easing his embarrassment.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I (from Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufman)
“There is nothing which obtains so general an influence over the manners and morals of a people as the Press; from that, as from a fountain, the streams of vice or virtue are poured forth over a country.” – Thomas Paine, “The Magazine in America” (emphasis in original)
“The wisest assemblies of men are as liable as individuals, to corruption and error. The greatest ravages which have ever been committed upon the liberty and happiness of mankind have been by weak and corrupted republics.” – Thomas Paine, “A Dialogue Between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood Near Boston”
“Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these Divine precepts! Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just ?—One would almost wish they could for once ; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.” – Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America” (emphasis in original)
“By early October 1939, the Polish army had ceased to exist . . . . The Red Army, which was no match for the Germans in mechanization, demonstrated its superiority to the Polish troops in the quality of its armaments, which included new tanks, aircraft, and modern guns—all products of Stalin’s industrialization effort. But to the surprise of many, the Soviet officers and soldiers were often badly dressed, poorly fed, and shocked by the relative abundance of food and goods in the Polish shops. The locals found Soviet officers ideologically indoctrinated, uncultured, and unsophisticated. For years, they would tell and retell stories about the wives of Red Army officers who allegedly attended theaters in nightgowns, believing them to be evening dresses.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“Was the Great Ukrainian Famine (in Ukrainian, the Holodomor) a premeditated act of genocide against Ukraine and its people? In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament defined it as such. A number of parliaments and governments around the world passed similar resolutions, while the Russian government launched an international campaign to undermine the Ukrainian claim. Political controversy and scholarly debate on the nature of the Ukrainian famine continue to this day, turning largely on the definition of the term ‘genocide.’ But a broad consensus is also emerging on some of the crucial facts and interpretations of the 1932-1933 famine. Most scholars agree that it was indeed a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy; while it also afflicted the North Caucasus, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan, only in Ukraine did it result from policies with clear ethnonational coloration: it came in the wake of Stalin’s decision to terminate the Ukrainization policy and in conjunction with an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres. The famine left Ukrainian society severely traumatized, crushing its capacity for open resistance to the regime for generations to come.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“The ‘Russian revolutionary sweep’ that Stalin wanted to combine with American efficiency came to Dniprohes with tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants unqualified to do the job but eager to make a living. The number of workers employed in the construction of the dam and the electric power station grew from 13,000 in 1927 to 36,000 in 1931. The turnover was extremely high, even though the Soviets abandoned the earlier policy of equal pay for all categories of workers, and the top managers received up to ten times as much as unqualified workers; qualified workers made three times as much as the latter. Peasants had to turn into workers not only by learning trades but also by getting accustomed to coming in on time, not taking breaks at will, and following the orders of their superiors. It was a tall order for many new arrivals at the construction site of communism. In 1932, the Dniprohes administration hired 90,000 workers and released 60,000.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“Courts acknowledge that running a prison is an inordinately difficult undertaking that requires expertise, planning, and the commitment of resources, all of which are peculiarly within the province of the legislative and executive branches of government. Courts must therefore accord substantial deference to the professional judgment of prison administrators, who bear a significant responsibility for defining the legitimate goals of a corrections system and for determining the most appropriate means to accomplish them.” – Judge Matthew F. Kennelly, Koger v. Dart (internal quotes and citations omitted)
“Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.” – Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, 1985-1989
“No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” – Nelson Mandela
“Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire. For recognition, like all desire, and for the specifics of its reveries and programmes, too; and above all for betterness tout court. For alterity, something other than the exhausting social lie. For rest. And when the cracks in history open wide enough, the impulse may even jimmy them a little wider.” – China Miéville, “We Are All Thomas More’s Children”
“It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s. What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true. But the first job of those who do understand is to state what those consequences invariably are.” – Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest About Trump”
“Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as much as courage or honesty or compassion. Almost without exception, the periods of human civilization that we admire as we look back have been cosmopolitan in practice; even those, like the Bronze Age, that we imagine as monolithic and traditional turn out to be shaped by trade and exchange and multiple identity.” – Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest About Trump”
“The campaigns of the Mongol armies were the last and the most destructive in the long lines of nomad invasions from the steppes. In just over fifty years they conquered half the known world and it was only their adherence to tribal traditions and the rivalry of their princes that denied them the rest of it. Western Europe and Islam were not saved [on the battlefield], they were saved when Mongol armies halted in their moment of triumph. If [the Mongol leaders] had not died when they did, the largest empire that the world has ever known would have been bounded in the west not by the Carpathians and the Euphrates, but by the Atlantic Ocean.” – James Chambers, The Devil’s Horsemen
“Unlike the masters of other great empires, the Mongols contributed little to the civilizations that came after them. They adopted the cultures of their subjects and when their empire disintegrated the world forgot them, but they had altered the course of history and they had left it scarred. Russia was torn away from Europe, and when the Mongols abandoned it after two hundred years it was feudal and backward. Poland and Hungary were so devastated that they never emerged to play their part in the renaissance that followed in the west. Bulgaria, like Russia, was isolated and then fell to the Ottoman Turks, whom the Mongols had driven out of Khwarizm and who were one day to stand on the banks of the Danube as the Mongols had done. The lands that once nurtured the great civilizations of the Persians were returned to the desert and they have never recovered. Wherever the Mongols rode they left an irretrievably ruined economy and wherever they ruled they left a petty, self-important aristocracy and an exploited peasantry.” – James Chambers, The Devil’s Horsemen
“There is no man alive who is braver than Yessutai, no march can tire him and he feels neither hunger nor thirst; that is why he is unfit to command.” – Chingis Khan (quoted by James Chambers in The Devil’s Horsemen
“No one owns anyone’s culture, and that to believe otherwise is to deprive us of the human fullness and richness we all deserve. To reconcile this insight with an equally compelling American truth—that racial injustice is our inheritance and our responsibility—is the challenge for every artist and critic, black or white.” – George Packer, “Race, Art, and Essentialism”
“Pleasure is considered to be deeply ingrained in the human race, and that is why in educating the young we use pleasure and pain as rudders with which to steer them straight. Moreover, to like and to dislike what one should is thought to be of greatest importance in developing excellence of character. For in view of the fact that people choose the pleasant and avoid the painful, pleasure and pain pervade the whole of life and have the capacity of exerting a decisive influence for a life of excellence or virtue and happiness.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, Ch. 1
“Justice is a sort of mean, not in the same way as the other virtues are, but in that it is realized in a median amount, while injustice belongs to the extremes.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 5, Ch. 5
“If you put lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig.” – Jeffrey J. Kroll, “Cross Is More Fun, but Direct Is What Wins”
“Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“Police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents but outbreaks of a chronic national disease.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“Refugee camps provide food and shelter, but they do not provide political voice and agency for their populations. Global institutions do not have the power to include stateless people in political membership. This is the danger of cosmopolitan institutions—that everyone becomes a mere human body to be managed in a camp.” – Thomas Nail, “Migrant Cosmpolitanism”
“If we value democracy, if we want to live in a world marked by a vibrant public sphere that can generate the possibilities of hope and human betterment, then we need futures. Without futures, and without serious propositional clashes between different materialized futures, we have no politics, and we have no democracy. We merely have millimetric policy disputes that end up as the technocratic attending to marginally different versions of the status quo.
“We can sense these dangers at the moment when we look at the state of our increasingly illiberal democracies. The problems mount: from climate change to spiraling inequality; from crumbling infrastructure to a surveillance state that has no bounds. Yet, our political culture is fixed and frozen.
“As such, we find ourselves in a culture that can happily spend $250 million dollars per Hollywood movie to create the next sci-fi fantasy but finds it is beyond its imaginative capacities to design superb, sustainable, public housing. We can build fabulously elaborate multiplayer online fantasy games, where gamer avatars can have sex with their elf girlfriends, but providing web platforms that give working people more democratic control over their workplace is a fantasy too far. The potential of self-driving cars or the rise of Artificial Intelligence can be endlessly debated. But the idea that we might be able to regulate our financial institutions is presented as a process as mysterious, dangerous and futile as the attempt to locate Lord Voldermort’s horcruxes.
“Yes, there are future visions still engaged with in mainstream political debate. But what are they: The endless continuation of the neo-liberal present; apocalyptic modes of environmentalism; dystopian fears of the return of the caliphate. We can do much better than that.” – Damian White, “Critical Design and the Critical Social Sciences”
“No identifiable form of intelligence, talent, genius, or even experience seems necessary for ruling a country. Would-be rulers do not have to pass qualifying examinations in leadership or demonstrate competence in administration or show skill in diplomacy. They do not need to have good communication skills or even be popular with their subjects. While many leaders are imaginative, worldly, and intelligent, others are pedestrian, narrow-minded, and ignorant, which suggests that demonstrated ability or achievement has little to do with securing the highest office in the land.
“Leaders need not be sane, rational, or even mentally competent to rule a country. [Research reveals] high rates of alcoholism, drug use, depression, mania, and paranoia among certain kinds of rulers. Remarkably, over [the 20th] century, many rulers even have managed to keep power despite being floridly crazy or demented.
“Although intellectual or academic credentials seem irrelevant for ruling, one of the time-honored ways individuals establish their qualifications for leadership is by showing physical prowess and courage in battle.
“Throughout history, rulers who attain legendary status often tend to be those who have conquered other nations, won major wars, expanded their country’s boundaries, founded new nations, forcibly transformed their societies, and imposed their own beliefs on their subjects. In short, they have killed, plundered, oppressed, and destroyed. Rarely do rulers achieve greatness who have been ambassadors for peace, kept the status quo, defended free speech, promoted independent thinking, and avoided wars at all costs.”
– Arnold Ludwig, The King of the Mountain
“Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.” —John Roberts, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice, at his son’s 9th grade commencement, June, 2017
“Seduction is the new opium of the masses. It is liberty for a world without liberty, joy for a world without joy.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (trans. Reines)
“Ethical people are ethical at the core. That identifies who they are. Ethics cannot be engaged and disengaged at will.” – William C. Stewart, Jr., Subrogation Recovery: Principles and Practices
“What are the three things whose ugliness cannot be set aside? Stupidity, a mean nature, and lying.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)