Category: Politics & Law
“I shall never forget how you received the news of the secession of South Carolina. I happened to be in your room with you when the mail was brought in, and when you read of the actual passage of the formal and solemn withdrawal by that State from the Union, you cried like a little child, exclaiming: ‘My God, you Southern people don’t know what you are doing! Peaceable secession! There can be no peaceable secession. Secession means war. The North will fight you, and fight you hard, and God only knows how or where it will end!’” – from D. F. Boyd letter to General W. T. Sherman, July 17, 1875 (quoted in Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman)
“Neither must we listen to those who think that one should indulge in violent anger against one’s political enemies and imagine that such is the attitude of a great-spirited, brave man. For nothing is more commendable, nothing more becoming in a pre-eminently great man than courtesy and forbearance. Indeed, in a free people, where all enjoy equal rights before the law, we must school ourselves to affability and what is called ‘mental poise’; for if we are irritated when people intrude upon us at unseasonable hours or make unreasonable requests, we shall develop a sour, churlish temper, prejudicial to ourselves and offensive to others. And yet gentleness of spirit and forbearance are to be commended only with the understanding that strictness may be exercised for the good of the state; for without that, the government cannot be well administered.” – 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)
“My opinion is, the country is doctored to death, and if President and Congress would go to sleep like Rip Van Winkle, the country could go on under natural influences, and recover far faster than under their joint and several treatment.” – William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
“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)
“Our beneficence should not exceed our means; for those who wish to be more open-handed than their circumstances permit are guilty of two faults: first they do wrong to their next of kin; for they transfer to strangers property which would more justly be placed at their service or bequeathed to them. And second, such generosity too often engenders a passion for plundering and misappropriating property, in order to supply the means for making large gifts. We may also observe that a great many people do many things that seem to be inspired more by a spirit of ostentation than by heart-felt kindness; for such people are not really generous but are rather influenced by a sort of ambition to make a show of being open-handed. Such a pose is nearer akin to hypocrisy than to generosity or moral goodness.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“No phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“I can’t bear to accept that everything is basically going to shit. And everything is: the economy, the family, the social structures, the class divide, the political process in this country, global warming, random violence from terrorism. Unless you want to live in denial, I feel that you have to train yourself to find hope. The logical response is to get incredibly depressed, but what’s the point of that?” – A. M. Homes (from interview by Richard Grant)
“A.D. 1137. This year went the King Stephen over sea to Normandy, and there was received; for that they concluded that he should be all such as the uncle was; and because he had got his treasure: but he dealed it out, and scattered it foolishly. Much had King Henry gathered, gold and silver, but no good did men for his soul thereof. When the King Stephen came to England, he held his council at Oxford; where he seized the Bishop Roger of Sarum, and Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and the chancellor Roger, his nephew; and threw all into prison till they gave up their castles. When the traitors understood that he was a mild man, and soft, and good, and no justice executed, then did they all wonder. They had done him homage, and sworn oaths, but they no truth maintained. They were all forsworn, and forgetful of their troth; for every rich man built his castles, which they held against him: and they filled the land full of castles. They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-works; and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then took they those whom they supposed to have any goods, both by night and by day, labouring men and women, and threw them into prison for their gold and silver, and inflicted on them unutterable tortures; for never were any martyrs so tortured as they were. Some they hanged up by the feet, and smoked them with foul smoke; and some by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung coats of mail on their feet. They tied knotted strings about their heads, and twisted them till the pain went to the brains. They put them into dungeons, wherein were adders, and snakes, and toads; and so destroyed them. Some they placed in a crucet-house; that is, in a chest that was short and narrow, and not deep; wherein they put sharp stones, and so thrust the man therein, that they broke all the limbs. In many of the castles were things loathsome and grim, called ‘Sachenteges’, of which two or three men had enough to bear one. It was thus made: that is, fastened to a beam; and they placed a sharp iron [collar] about the man’s throat and neck, so that he could in no direction either sit, or lie, or sleep, but bear all that iron. Many thousands they wore out with hunger. I neither can, nor may I tell all the wounds and all the pains which they inflicted on wretched men in this land. This lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king; and it grew continually worse and worse. They constantly laid guilds on the towns, and called it “tenserie”; and when the wretched men had no more to give, then they plundered and burned all the towns; that well thou mightest go a whole day’s journey and never shouldest thou find a man sitting in a town, nor the land tilled. Then was corn dear, and flesh, and cheese, and butter; for none was there in the land. Wretched men starved of hunger. Some had recourse to alms, who were for a while rich men, and some fled out of the land. Never yet was there more wretchedness in the land; nor ever did heathen men worse than they did: for, after a time, they spared neither church nor churchyard, but took all the goods that were therein, and then burned the church and all together. Neither did they spare a bishop’s land, or an abbot’s, or a priest’s, but plundered both monks and clerks; and every man robbed another who could. If two men, or three, came riding to a town, all the township fled for them, concluding them to be robbers. The bishops and learned men cursed them continually, but the effect thereof was nothing to them; for they were all accursed, and forsworn, and abandoned. To till the ground was to plough the sea: the earth bare no corn, for the land was all laid waste by such deeds; and they said openly, that Christ slept, and his saints. Such things, and more than we can say, suffered we nineteen winters for our sins.” – Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (trans. Ingram & Giles)
“The king and the head men loved much, and overmuch, covetousness in gold and in silver; and recked not how sinfully it was got, provided it came to them. The king let his land at as high a rate as he possibly could; then came some other person, and bade more than the former one gave, and the king let it to the men that bade him more. Then came the third, and bade yet more; and the king let it to hand to the men that bade him most of all: and he recked not how very sinfully the stewards got it of wretched men, nor how many unlawful deeds they did; but the more men spake about right law, the more unlawfully they acted. They erected unjust tolls, and many other unjust things they did.” — From the entry for A.D. 1087, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (trans. Ingram & Giles)
“In a certain technoutopian view of the future, we are headed toward a post-property world. The shift from ownership to access is supposed to liberate us, enable greater sharing of resources, fuel human creativity, create more prosperity, and lead to greater equality. What we so often forget to ask, however, is who controls access? Who builds the highways?” – Whitney Erin Boesel, “Spotevangelism”
“The problem in politics is this: You don’t get any credit for disaster averted. Going to the voters and saying, ‘Boy, things really suck, but you know what? If it wasn’t for me, they would suck worse.’ That is not a platform on which anybody has ever gotten elected in the history of the world.” – Barney Frank, quoted in Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail
“As sophisticated as the world’s markets have become, the glue that holds the entire arrangement together remains old-fashioned trust. Once that vanishes, things can unravel very quickly.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail
“If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it: and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.” – Edmund Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs (1791)
“Pre-emption is among the most important philosophical and strategic underpinnings for counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, and after years of being honed in Fallujah and Kandahar, COIN has been imported to the West, where it compliments the growing militarization of law enforcement and the transformation of local police forces into hybrid paramilitary-intelligence organizations.” — Jacob Silverman, “City Under Siege”
“What history can do is show that people have to take responsibility for what they activate out of their tradition. It’s not just a given thing one slavishly follows. You have to be accountable.” — Karen King, quoted by Ariel Sabar in “The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus”
“Before the 1770s, the idea of a magical document that ‘constituted’ your government, state, and politics—the idea that all laws and governmental authority would have to refer back to a single document, a single code—was almost as surprising as the idea that independence was something you could just speak into existence, declare. Pretty much all the other governments in the world lacked any pretense of representing the will of their people; the king was the king because he was the king, and because Fuck You, and also maybe because of the Bible. But mostly he was the king because he had all these guys with swords and guns and horses that would come to your house and burn it down and murder you.” — Aaron Bady, “Dumb Computers, Smart Cops” (emphasis in original)
“The relationship between war and literature is an old one, maybe even constitutive for literature. The re-creation of a traumatic past through fiction – though this does not represent reality as it was – can have a powerful impact on people and their memory, often a much stronger impact than historiography.” — Igor Stiks (quoted by Spela Mocnik in Asymptote)
“Chickens and cows exist because we eat them. If we didn’t eat them they probably wouldn’t be here, at least in the same numbers. I don’t think humans are going to stop eating other animals any time soon, and I don’t think they should. But the system as it exists is sick and broken and nobody should be eating a distraught, unhappy, abused animal. We are literally making ourselves ill with them. One way that I see that a lot is when it comes to the emotional lives of captive animals or animals trapped inside the fur or meat industries. I think that’s unconscionable. But I don’t think that means we need to stop eating meat or wearing leather, instead we need to completely reevaluate the process, and there are so many great minds doing that right now. It may mean that we can’t wear leather or eat meat at the scale or in the ways we do now.” – Laurel Braitman (from Malcolm Harris interview in The New Inquiry)
“Governments fear their people. They fear we will exercise our power to change them, and they fear we will panic. The first is a realistic if undemocratic fear, since changing them is our right; the second is a self-aggrandising fantasy in which attempts to alter the status quo are seen as madness, hysteria, mob rule. They often assume that we can’t handle the data in a crisis, and so prefer to withhold crucial information, as the Pennsylvania government did in 1979 at the time of the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown, and the Soviet government did during the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. Panic is what you see in disaster movies, where people run about doing foolish things, impeding evacuation and rescue, behaving like sheep. But governments and officials are not very good shepherds. During the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, the university authorities locked down the administrative offices and warned their own families, while withholding information from the campus community. The Bush administration lied about the toxicity of the air near Ground Zero in New York after 9/11, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk for the sake of a good PR front and a brisk return to business as usual. Disasters often crack open fissures between government and civil society.” — Rebecca Solnit, “Diary: In Fukushima”
“Look at the history of innovation! If people don’t call you nuts, then you are doing something wrong.” – Peter Eisenberger (quoted by Michael Specter in “The Climate Fixers”)
“Individualism isn’t the antithesis of community or socialism. To think so is to assume that attaining autonomy as an individual requires the denial of all tradition and solidarity, whether inherited or invented, or it is to assume that economic self-assertion through liberty of contract is the path to genuine selfhood. We know better – we know without consulting Aristotle that selfhood is a social construction – but we keep claiming that our interests as individuals are by definition in conflict with larger public goods like social mobility and equal access to justice and opportunity.
“We keep urging our fellow Americans to ‘rise above’ a selfish attachment to their own little fiefdoms, whether these appear as neighborhoods or jobs, and their cherished consumer goods. In doing so, we’re asking them to give up their local knowledge, livelihoods, and identities on behalf of an unknown future, a mere abstraction, a canvas stretched to accommodate only the beautiful souls among us: we’re asking them to get religion. Either that or we’ve acceded to the anti-American fallacy cooked up by the neoclassical economists who decided in the 1950s that liberty and equality, or individualism and solidarity – like capitalism and socialism – are the goals of a zero-sum game.
“By now we know what the founders did: that equality is the enabling condition of liberty, and vice versa. There were two ‘cardinal objects of Government,’ as James Madison put it to his friend and pupil Thomas Jefferson in 1787: ‘the rights of persons and the rights of property.’ Each constitutional purpose permitted the other, not as an ‘allowance’ but rather as a premise. One is not the price of the other, as in a cost imposed on and subtracted from the benefit of the other. Instead, liberty for all has been enhanced by our belated approach to equality, our better approximations of a more perfect union; for example, by the struggles and victories of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement. By the same token, democratic socialism enhances individuality. By equipping more people with the means by which they can differentiate themselves, if they choose, from their origins – income and education are the crucial requisites here – socialism becomes the solvent of plainclothes uniformity and the medium of unruly, American-style individualism.”
– James Livingston, “How the Left Has Won”
“Social democracy is impossible without political and cultural pluralism, but such pluralism is inconceivable in the absence of markets geared toward decentered consumer choices, which are in turn dependent on price systems, advertisements, novelty, and fashion; in other words, on the bad taste, bad faith, and bad manners that come with ‘reification,’ aka consumer culture. When the economic future is left in the hands of the oligarchs – the best and the brightest, those who know what’s good for us, whether they’re from the Politburo, Harvard, or Goldman Sachs – the political future will be theirs, too. Like capitalism, and like democracy, socialism needs markets to thrive, and vice versa.” – James Livingston, “How the Left Has Won”
“Socialism resides in and flows from markets as modulated and administered by corporations, trade unions, consumer associations, and other interest groups as well as from public policy, executive orders, regulatory agencies, court decisions, or five-year plans. In its original nineteenth-century definitions, and in later translations by Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, “socialism” signified a demand for the supremacy of civil society over the state; it thus carried profoundly liberal, pro-market, yet anticapitalist connotations. It meant the “self-management” of society as well as the workplace – the sovereignty of the people – and by the late twentieth century it was profoundly realistic in view of new thinking about markets and new intellectual capacities enabled by universal education and mass communications.” – James Livingston, “How the Left Has Won”
“Firearms are potent objects of power; someone who picks up a gun instantly alters his status and relationship to those around him. They provide a quick fix to those feeling profoundly impotent and without recourse. This alteration is the reason that certain young people, feeling especially vulnerable and powerless in their teen-age years, are attracted to violent gun use. It is the reason that members of a neighborhood watch might feel the need to arm themselves. The criminal use of guns is a symptom of larger problems of disempowerment in this country. The answer is not to ban firearms or even regulate them–something I happen to support–but to provide the social, economic, and emotional tools that citizens need to feel a sense of control over their lives. Guns have become such strong symbols of violence and supremacy that it is much easier to talk about firearms regulation than to talk about the complex social and racial issues in this country, including Americans’ lack of access to adequate mental-health care. The problem isn’t that it is easy to get a gun in America; the problem is that obtaining a gun is easier than getting therapy, or achieving racial equality and financial stability.” — Barbara Eldredge, “To Keep and Bear Arms”
“Until we have created a romance of peace that would equal that of war, violence will not disappear from people’s lives.” – Count Harry Kessler (quoted by Alex Ross in “Diary of an Aesthete”)
“Junkies and alcoholics are interesting to watch for about five minutes, and then the tedium of their bottomless need, their self-aggrandizing defensiveness, sinks in, and you want to tun screaming for your life—because they’ll suck it out of you, given the chance.” – Hilton Als, “Down but Not Defeated”
“Editorial writers can seem the most insipid and helpless of the scribbling class: they sum up anonymously the ideas of their time, and truth and insipidity do a great deal of close dancing–the right thing to do is often hard but seldom surprising. Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.” — Adam Gopnik, “Facing History”
“They who tell the people revolutionary legends, they who amuse themselves with sensational stories, are as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators.” – Sean Bonney, Happiness (Poems after Rimbaud)