Category: Politics & Law
“It is easy to be cynical about government—and rarely does such cynicism go unrewarded. Take, for instance, policy towards women. Some politicians declare that they value women’s unique role, which can be shorthand for keeping married women at home looking after the kids. Others create whole ministries devoted to policies for women, which can be a device for parking women’s issues on the periphery of policy where they cannot do any harm. Still others, who may actually mean what they say, pass laws giving women equal opportunities to men. Yet decreeing an end to discrimination is very different from bringing it about. Amid this tangle of evasion, half-promises and wishful thinking, some policymakers have embraced a technique called gender budgeting. It not only promises to do a lot of good for women, but carries a lesson for advocates of any cause: the way to a government’s heart is through its pocket.” – The Economist, February 25th, 2017
“A victory for the wrong reason is still a victory.” – Practitioner’s Handbook for Appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 2014 ed.
“Power concerns the organization, arrangement, and distribution of material objects in physical space. Whatever ideas and ideals are brought to bear on this process are necessarily corrupted and weighed down by their contact with decaying matter. Politics, in other words, is the art of juggling corpses and anyone whose highest value is power stinks of the grave.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One
“Of all literary genres, tragedy alone remains free from the pretensions to arithmetic that, until history caught up with them, were still indulged in by German philosophers and English novelists, who compensated for their thematic anxieties as an ostrich might—by limiting their scope to the trifling situations of everyday morality. Such moralists are nothing more, in the final analysis, than the authors of etiquette manuals, dressed up in logic and argument, on the one hand, and narrative and dialogue, on the other. In their books, they were content to waltz and quadrille over the depths where tragedy is written because a century of improvements in shoe manufacture enabled them to forget that, in history, there is no floor.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One
“Moderns regard violence as something internal to human beings: they often speak of the violence that originates in mankind, as if violence were a series of actions a man might perform, or—were he less ignorant, irrational, or superstitious—might as well not perform. That is why moderns are always surprised by sudden outbreaks of violence; it is why they ultimately cannot understand the phenomenon, even as their scientific and technological achievements multiply it exponentially. The ancients, however, knew better. Violence does not exist in man; man exists in violence. Man is merely a vessel for violence, the site where it occurs, the name given by violence itself to the instrument that enacts it. When the man in man is stripped away, he returns to his source and becomes his God.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One
“Shame brings honor. Shame is the crown of the soul and a sense of shame the highest virtue.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
“Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.” – Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
“Protestant versions of the Christian faith tend to lean more heavily than the Catholic on the family-cult theology of the Old Testament, which when seriously considered as an appropriate base for a proper world religion is constitutionally ineligible, since it is finally but the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured genealogy of a single sub-race of a southwest Asian Semitic strain, late to appear and, though of great and noble influence, by no means what its own version of the history of the human race sets it up to be.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
“No experience is more likely to put politics out of mind, more thoroughly prove it irrelevant, and better teach how to forget it, than the experience, through art, of what is everlasting in man. And at a time when world political events of truly fearful force are involving all that is in us of individual human worth in sympathetic participation, overwhelming it and bearing it away—precisely at such a time it is fitting to stand firm against the megalomaniacs of politics, in defense, namely, of the truth that the essential thing in life, the true humanity of life, never is even touched by political means.” – Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (trans. Joseph Campbell)
“Politics I hate, and the belief in politics, because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, harsh, and inhuman. I do not believe in the formulae of the anthill, the human beehive; do not believe in the république démocratique, sociale et universelle; do not believe that mankind was made for what is being called ‘happiness,’ or that it even wants this happiness,’—do not believe in ‘belief,’ but rather in despair, because it is this that clears the way to deliverance; I believe in humility and work—work on oneself, and the highest, noblest, sternest, and most joyous form of such work seems to me to be art.” – Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (trans. Joseph Campbell; emphasis in original)
“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this, that what you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me. Now here in this country we’ve got something called a nigger. It doesn’t, in such terms, I beg you to remark, exist in any other country in the world. We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him. I’ve always known—I had to know by the time I was seventeen years old—that what you were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of, and you invested me with it. Now, if that’s so, no matter what you’ve done to me, I can say to you this, and I mean it, I know you can’t do any more and I’ve got nothing to lose. And I know and have always known—and really always, that is part of the agony—I’ve always known that I’m not a nigger. But if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here. I know one thing from another. I know I was born, I’m going to suffer, and I’m going to die. The only way you get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else, anything else. I learned this because I’ve had to learn it. But you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. Well, he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I’m going to give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.” – James Baldwin, Take This Hammer
“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” – Hannah Arendt (interviewed by Roger Errera in The New York Review of Books)
“Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: ‘Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.’ Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. . . . Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.” – Hannah Arendt (interviewed by Roger Errera in The New York Review of Books)
“Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which today we cannot form even an idea.” – Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (trans. Charles Francis Atkinson)
“Civilization, seriously regarded, cannot be described in economic terms. In their peak periods civilizations are mythologically inspired, like youth. Early arts are not, like late, the mere secondary concerns of a people devoted first to economics, politics, comfort, and then, in their leisure time, to aesthetic enjoyment. On the contrary, economics, politics, and even war (crusade) are, in such periods, but functions of a motivating dream of which the arts too are an irrepressible expression. The formative force of a traditional civilization is a kind of compulsion neurosis shared by all members of the implicated domain, and the leading practical function of religious (i.e. mythological) education, therefore, is to infect the young with the madness of their elders—or, in sociological terms, to communicate to its individuals the ‘system of sentiments’ on which the group depends for survival as a unit.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (emphasis in original)
“Every child is born with a certain balance of faculties, aptitudes, inclinations, and instinctive leanings. In no two is the balance alike, and each different brain has to deal with a different tide of experience. I marvel, then, not that one man should disagree with another concerning the ultimate realities of life, but that so many, in spite of the diversity of their inborn natures, should reach so large a measure of agreement.” – Sir Arthur Keith, Living Philosophies
“In the recent past it may have been possible for intelligent men of good will honestly to believe that their own society (whatever it happened to be) was the only good, that beyond its bounds were the enemies of God, and that they were called upon, consequently, to project the principle of hatred outward on the world, while cultivating love within, toward those whose ‘system of sentiments’ was of God. Today, however, there is no such outward. Enclaves of national, racial, religious, and class provincialism persist, but the physical facts have made closed horizons illusory. The old god is dead, with his little world and his little, closed society. The new focal center of belief and trust is mankind. And if the principle of love cannot be wakened actually within each—as it was mythologically in God—to master the principle of hate, the Waste Land alone can be our destiny and the masters of the world its fiends.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
“The older mythic orders gave authority to their symbols by attributing them to gods, to culture heroes, or to some such high impersonal force as the order of the universe; and the image of society itself, thus linked to the greater image of nature, became a vessel of religious awe. Today we know, for the most part, that our laws are not from God or from the universe, but from ourselves; are conventional, not absolute; and that in breaking them we offend not God but man. Neither animals nor plants, not the zodiac or its supposed maker, but our fellows have now become the masters of our fate and we of theirs.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
“The ultimate success of all government is dependent upon the proper management of human susceptibilities rather than upon the faithful obeisance to preconceived theories and images.” – Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History
“A master is not justified in putting his tow to every test which she will survive, if she be fit. There is a zone in which proper caution will avoid putting her capacity to the proof; a coefficient of prudence that he should not disregard.” – Judge Learned Hand, The T. J. Hooper, Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1932
“Without arguing the point as to whether a state can survive without compelling its subjects to accept as Absolute Truth whatever system of belief the dominant elite may have decided to put forth as divine revelation, we shall observe . . . that gods suppressed become demons; which is to say, that psychological and sociological factors neither assimilated nor recognized by the consciously controlled system become autonomous and must ultimately break the approved system apart.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
“Staggering under his crushing burden of taxes, in a State which was practically bankrupt, the citizen of every class had now become a mere cog in the vast machinery of the government. He had no other function than to toil for the State, which exacted so much of the fruit of his labor he was fortunate if it proved barely possible for him to survive on what was left. As a mere toiler for the State, he was finally where the peasant on the Nile had been for thousands of years.” – James Henry Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization
“The paramount concern of a popular religion cannot be, and never has been, ‘Truth,’ but the maintenance of a certain type of society, the inculcation in the young and refreshment in the old of an approved ‘system of sentiments’ upon which the local institutions and government depend.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
“Now: try to imagine real gender equality. Actually, try to imagine an America that is female-dominated, since a true working democracy in this country would reflect our 54-46 voting advantage. Now imagine such a democracy, in which women would be valued so very highly, as a world that is accepting and responsible about human sexuality; in which there is no coerced sex without serious jailtime; in which there are affordable, safe contraceptives available for the taking in every public health building; in which there is economic parity for women—and basic economic subsistence for every baby born: and in which every young American woman knows about and understands her natural desire as a treasure to cherish, and responsibly, when the time is right, on her own terms, to share. In such a world, in which the idea of gender as a barrier has become a dusty artifact, we would probably use a very different language about what would be—then—the rare and doubtless traumatic event of abortion. That language would probably call upon respect and responsibility, grief and mourning. In that world we might well describe the unborn and the never-to-be-born with the honest words of life. And in that world, passionate feminists might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.” – Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls”
“The pro-life warning about the potential of widespread abortion to degrade reverence for life does have a nugget of truth: a free-market rhetoric about abortion can, indeed, contribute to the eerie situation we are now facing, wherein the culture seems increasingly to see babies not as creatures to whom parents devote their lives but as accoutrements to enhance parental quality of life. Day by day, babies seem to have less value in themselves, in a matrix of the sacred, than they do as products with a value dictated by a market economy. Stories surface regularly about ‘worthless’ babies left naked on gratings or casually dropped out of windows, while ‘valuable’, genetically correct babies are created at vast expense and with intricate medical assistance for infertile couples. If we fail to treat abortion with grief and reverence, we risk forgetting that, when it comes to the children we choose to bear, we are here to serve them—whomever they are: they are not here to serve us.” – Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls”
“The morning of the election I thought about what it means to vote for a woman. Voting for a woman felt like voting for respect, for tolerance, for justice, for peace, for empathy, for righteousness, for equality, for color, for movement, for understanding, for listening, for strength, for kindness, for hope, for openness, for braveness, for black lives, for gay rights, for emotion, for feeling, for spirit, for heart, for story, for making, for holding, for inclusivity, for love.” – Anna Dunn, “Lines of Resistance”
“When a person exercises a common right, without negligence or malice, to render such action a nuisance, and therefore to hold the defendant liable, it must be such an act in itself as to be a nuisance to all or to a majority of the persons living in the neighborhood, and not simply, by exceptional circumstances, to one person.” – Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Rogers v. Elliott, 146 Mass. 349 (1888)
“There had been a deep and unsubtle optimism among Americans. The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor created a different sensibility that suspected that prosperity and security were an illusion, with disaster lurking behind them. There was a fear that everything could suddenly go wrong, horribly so, and that people who simply accepted peace and prosperity at face value were naïve. The two shocks created a dark sense of foreboding that undergirds American society to this day.” – George Friedman, “World War II and the Origins of American Unease”
“If there is a choice in explaining a government action between a Machiavellian, clever, ingenious plot to achieve that result and sort of blind, bumbling, well-meant incompetence, choose number two all the time.” – Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence (interviewed by Kathy Gilsinan in The Atlantic)
“The Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos, jailed for political reasons, wrote his poems on cigarette papers while in prison, stuffed them into the lining of his jacket and, when he was released, walked out wearing his collected poems. They were mostly short.” – Daniel Halpern, “A Few Questions for Poetry”