Quotations III Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasioin of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. Louis Brandeis Authority has simply been abused too long in the Catholic church, and for many people it just becomes utterly stupid and intolerable to have to put up with the kind of jackassing around that is imposed in God's name. It is an insult to God himself and in the end it can only discredit all idea of authority and obedience. There comes a point where they simply forfeit the right to be listened to. Thomas Merton in a letter to W. H. Ferry, dated January 19, 1967, 23 months before Merton's death. I could talk until about the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland. But that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There's a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something , and Catholicism - even if I don't like sentimentalizing it - was the backdrop to that whole thig. The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean - the crystalline elsewhere of the world. Seamus Heaney A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest. Martin Heiddeger We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human. Jacquelyn Small The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. Erich Fromm People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. Emerson Our irrational contemporary Western impatience and our blind adulation of speed for speed's sake are wreaking havoc on the education of our children. We force them as if they were chicks in a pullet factory. We drive them into premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them. In fact we deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood. Arnold Toynbee In this modern world we are confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideas because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. G. K. Chesterton The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. Chesterton, 1910 Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. Charles Kuralt "Despite Federal aid expenditures on Puerto Rico of approximately $9 billion per year (close to the total amount of United States aid to the rest of the world combined), 60 per cent of Puerto Ricans live below the poverty line..." From Thomas Caruthers review of "Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World" by Jose Trias Monge (Yale U. Press) in The New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1997 It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of the scientific idea of man and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state. Jacques Maritain Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good. Gandhi Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. Jerry Garcia Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tom Lehrer Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. John Adams Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and conniptions. E. B. White There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose. John Mason Brown The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote.... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only minority of the voter votes. Chesterton Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen. Mort Sahl Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men. Ralph Waldo Emerson Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. Lewis Mumford In this country we encourage "creativity" among the medicore, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow "too much." Pauline Kael No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. Antonin Artaud The question becomes: what is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What is the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood? Leonard Cohen There is a marvelous story of a man who once stood before God, his heart breaking form the pain and injustice in the world. "Dear God," he cried out, "look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in the world. Why don't you send help?" God responded, "I did send help. I sent you." David J. Wolpe "Realistic" people who pursue "practical" aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run of life as the dreamers who pursue their dreams. Hans Selye It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Frank Zappa When I was 19, I went to live in Tanzania because it was a socialist country, and I wanted to see socialism. It was the closest thing to African socialism, called ujamaa. It means unity in Swahili. I lived in an ujamaa village, and it was boring to me. Henry Louis Gates, The Progressive 1/98 "For white people there are only two types of Indians. Drunken bums and noble Indians. In the old days, we used to be savages, but that's gone. Now it's drunks and noble Indians. I like the white men better who think we're all drunks. At least they're looking at us as people. They're saying what they see. Then when they meet one of us who's not drunk, they have to deal with us.... The ones who see us all as wisse men don't care about the Indians at all. They just care about the idea of Indian. It's just another way of stunting our humanity and making us into a fantasy that fits the needs of white people." Neither Wolf nor Dog (On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder --- Tape transcriptions) by Kent Nerburn "An awkward term at best, "presentism" nevertheless names a malaise that plagues American discussions of anything and everything concerning the past: the widespread inability to make appropriate allowances for prevailing historical conditions. Douglas L. Wilson In the sixties, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia, I lived in a so-called third-world country. In those years and since, I have traveled in Asia and Africa through much of the so-called under-developled world. In the sixties and seventies I worked as a legal services lawyer on Chicago's West Side, representing primarily poor people in criminal and civil actions. Nothing I saw as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa or as a traveler in Africa and Asia comes close to matching the despair and misery that today strangles the American underclass. What was beginning to happen in the inner city in the sixties and early seventies was mild compared to what occurs now I consider myself a liberal. And I'm proud to be a liberal, though I dread the direction in which many so-called liberals have gone. Actually I view the liberal left as reactionary -- conservative -- because they refuse to question any of their cherished opinions or even consider countervailing evidence.... ... By criticizing liberals I do not inferentially suggest that the right holds the answer. If the left is ideologically bankrupt, the right is intellectually dead." "Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children" (1997) by Patrick T. Murphy, Public Guardian of Cook County, Illinois (In 1855) la Ley Lerdo obliged the Church to sell its lands with sales tax going to the state. Speculators snapped up lands. The educational and charitable functions which the Church carried on among Indios ceased. For all its encouragement of superstition and reverence for the existing order, the religious corporations never, as the liberals came to admit, matched the rapacity and cruelty of the new private owners. The Ley Lerdo, in the name of progress, caused a further barbarization of the countryside. from "Fire and Blood" by T.R. Fehrenbach "I have prayed to the Lord every day. It's just so sad that someone could take such beautiful children. I have put all my trust and faith in the Lord that he will bring them home to us." Susan Smith, after accusing a black man of kidnapping her children and before it was discovered she had rolled the car containing them into a lake where they drowned. I just wish they'd give me one speck of proof that this world of theirs couldn't have been set up and handled better by a half dozen idiots bound hand and foot at the bottom of a ten mile well. Kenneth Patchen It is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity. Cherríe Moraga Life is that which --- pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially --- interrupts. Cynthia Ozick Whenever an interruption occurred, St. Frances de Sales immediately set aside what he was doing. Then, he greeted his interruptor with good humor and a deep sense of gratitude. Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. John Lennon St. John of the Cross, alone in his room in profound prayer, experienced a rapturous vision of Mary. At the same moment, he heard a beggar rattling at his door for alms. He wrenched himself away and saw to the beggar's needs. When he returned, the vision returned again, saying that at the very moment he had heard the door rattle on its hinges, his soul had hung in perilous balance. Had he not gone to the beggar's aid, she could never have appeared to him again. David Whyte Dante says that the journey begins right here. In the middle of the road. Right beneath your feet. This is the place. There is no other place and no other time. Even if you are successful and follow the road you have set yourself, you can never leave here. Despite everything you have achieved, life refuses to grant you immunity from its difficulties. Becoming aware of this after a lifetime of accepting success as the ultimate healing balm is, declares Dante, like waking up in a dark wood. David Whyte If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. I this good news? Robert Anthony Wishing to be known only for what one really is, is like putting on an old, easy, comfortable garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, "Here I am --- just so ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous. Take me or leave me...." It is like a great burden rolled off a man's back when he comes to want to appear nothing that he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his own, and to wait for something strong and deep within him or behind him to work through him. David Grayson Did you ever see little dogs caressing and playing with one another? So that you might say there is nothing more friendly? But, that you may know what friendship is, throw a bit of flesh among them, and you will learn. Epictetus The world is divided into people who thing they are right. Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey. Marcel Proust I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickkness is a place, more instructive than a long rtrip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies. Flannery O'Connor No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the causes of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs; we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power. P.J. O'Rourke Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. Frances FitzGerald Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Anatole France It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so. Felix Okoye At the structural level, most authentic work is not so much "doing," but "undoing." I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. Jay Gould, Railroad Owner, before 1886 strike on his Southwestern system Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other. An English journalist observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. (Quoted by Annie Dillard) "The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of," Mao told Nehru. "China has many people..... The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China's population. Does Mao's reckoning shock me really? If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter's life, would I do it? Probably. How many others' lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three? Three hundred million?" Annie Dillard Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell. Walter Bagehot A full belly does not believe in hunger. Italian proverb Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of civilization. Who cares whether Caesar stole or Caesare Borgia cheated?.... The real evil that follows a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. John J. Chapman Don't confuse having a career with having a life. They are not the same. First Lady Hillary Clinton, delivering Howard University's commencement speech Did you ever notice that when the other driver is going slower than you are he's a moron, and when he's going faster he's a maniac? George Carlin Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. Terry Tempest Williams True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. Clarence Darrow Every adult, no matter how unfortunate a childhood he had or how habit-ridden he may be, is free to make choices about his life. To say of Hitler, to say of the criminal, that he did not choose to be bad but was a victim of his upbringing is to make all morality, all discussion of right and wrong, impossible. It leaves unanswered the question of why people in similar circumstances did not all become Hitlers. But worse, to say "It is not his fault; he was not free to choose" is to rob a person of his humanity, and reduce him to the level of an animal who is bound by instinct. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace. Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved. Barbara Johnson It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love. Thomas Sowell For an anthropologist, the widespread failure to marry is a sign of impending disaster In Africa there is a saying: "They are our enemies, and so we marry them." Marriage helps families multiply their economic capital --- and, perhaps even more important, their social capital. You and your wife's uncle may not like each other, but marriage imposes a set of reciprocal obligations; you are at least partly responsible for each other's well-being. David Murray The fundamental task of education in a democracy is what Tocqueville once called the apprenticeship of liberty: learning to be free. I wonder whether Americans still believe liberty has to be learned and that its skills are worth learning. Or have they been deluded by two centuries of rhetoric into thinking that freedom is "natural" and can be taken for granted? The claim that men are born free, upon which America was founded, is at best a promising fiction. In real life, as every parent knows, children are born fragile, born needy, born ignorant, born unformed, born weak, born foolish, born dependent --- born in chains. We acquire our freedom over time, if at all Liberal-arts education actually means education in the arts of liberty; the "servile arts" were the trades learned by unfree men in the Middle Ages, the vocational education of their day... Jefferson and Adams both understood that the Bill of Rights offered little protection in a nation without informed citizens. However, once educated (and not merely instructed in the performance of a trade) a people was safe from even the subtlest tyrannies. Jefferson's democratic proclivities rested on his conviction that education could turn a people into a safe refuge -- indeed "the only safe depository" for the ultimate powers of society. "Cherish therefore the spirit of our people," he wrote to Edward Carrington in 1787, "and keep alive their attention. Do not be severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves." We have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility. We have de-coupled rights from civic responsibilities and severed citizenship from education on the false assumption that citizens just happen. We have forgotten that the "public" in public schools means not just paid for by the public but procreative of the very idea of a public.... Benjamin Barber .... in a world where doing nothing has such dire consequences, complacency has become a greater sin than malevolence... Benjamin Barber "I'd be happy to give him (oral sex) just to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Former Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh, discussing an article in Mirabella magazine in which she recalled a willingness to be "ravished by the President" after playing hearts with him on Air Force One. Newsweek, July 20, 1998 I had only one stock and I figured out that if the stock hit a certain point, I was going to be a billionaire. I was still in the tiny office where I was when I was worth a few million. I couldn't tell anyone at the office. All of my friends were working at the company --- the highest-paid person made about $100,000.00 -- and I was so much richer than my other friends in Atlanta that I couldn't tell them, because they'd think I was bragging. So I went home and told my wife, and she said, "I don't care, I've got to help the kids with their homework." No one even cared. I thought bells and whistles would go off. Nothing happened at all. Having great wealth is one of the most disappointing things. It's overrated, I can tell you that. It's not as good as average sex. Average sex is better than being a billionaire. Ted Turner According to Chesterton, tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything. Chesterton meant that as a critique of tolerance. But it captures nicely the upside of unbelief: where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution. When it is believed that on your religion hangs the fate of your immortal soul, the Inquisition follows easily; when it is believed that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes easily. After all, we don't persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods? Oddly, though, in our thoroughly secularized culture, there is one form of religious intolerance that does survive. And that is the disdain bordering on contempt of the culture makers for the deeply religious, i.e., those for whom religion is not a preference but a conviction. A letter fragment from Erik Schultes' friends who are homesteading in Norway Charity is no substitute for justice witheld. Augustine of Hippo Modern "productive" institutions at the same time foster and mask invidious individualism, something the subsistence-oriented institutions of all past ages were designed to reduce and to expose... The history of economic individualism coincides with the modernization of envy. In this essay, I discuss the appearance of a new kind of envy, characteristic of the relations between the sexes, one that arises only as gender fades from a society... Malevolent disparagement between men and women is not a new social phenomenon; the institutionalization of lifelong invidious comparison between genderless individuals is historically unprecedented. Ivan Illich, "Gender" People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it. John Steinbeck |
Quotations III Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasioin of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. Louis Brandeis Authority has simply been abused too long in the Catholic church, and for many people it just becomes utterly stupid and intolerable to have to put up with the kind of jackassing around that is imposed in God's name. It is an insult to God himself and in the end it can only discredit all idea of authority and obedience. There comes a point where they simply forfeit the right to be listened to. Thomas Merton in a letter to W. H. Ferry, dated January 19, 1967, 23 months before Merton's death. I could talk until about the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland. But that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There's a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something , and Catholicism - even if I don't like sentimentalizing it - was the backdrop to that whole thig. The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean - the crystalline elsewhere of the world. Seamus Heaney A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest. Martin Heiddeger We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human. Jacquelyn Small The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. Erich Fromm People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. Emerson Our irrational contemporary Western impatience and our blind adulation of speed for speed's sake are wreaking havoc on the education of our children. We force them as if they were chicks in a pullet factory. We drive them into premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them. In fact we deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood. Arnold Toynbee In this modern world we are confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideas because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. G. K. Chesterton The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. Chesterton, 1910 Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. Charles Kuralt "Despite Federal aid expenditures on Puerto Rico of approximately $9 billion per year (close to the total amount of United States aid to the rest of the world combined), 60 per cent of Puerto Ricans live below the poverty line..." From Thomas Caruthers review of "Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World" by Jose Trias Monge (Yale U. Press) in The New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1997 It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of the scientific idea of man and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state. Jacques Maritain Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good. Gandhi Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. Jerry Garcia Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tom Lehrer Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. John Adams Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and conniptions. E. B. White There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose. John Mason Brown The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote.... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only minority of the voter votes. Chesterton Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen. Mort Sahl Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men. Ralph Waldo Emerson Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. Lewis Mumford In this country we encourage "creativity" among the medicore, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow "too much." Pauline Kael No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. Antonin Artaud The question becomes: what is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What is the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood? Leonard Cohen There is a marvelous story of a man who once stood before God, his heart breaking form the pain and injustice in the world. "Dear God," he cried out, "look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in the world. Why don't you send help?" God responded, "I did send help. I sent you." David J. Wolpe "Realistic" people who pursue "practical" aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run of life as the dreamers who pursue their dreams. Hans Selye It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Frank Zappa When I was 19, I went to live in Tanzania because it was a socialist country, and I wanted to see socialism. It was the closest thing to African socialism, called ujamaa. It means unity in Swahili. I lived in an ujamaa village, and it was boring to me. Henry Louis Gates, The Progressive 1/98 "For white people there are only two types of Indians. Drunken bums and noble Indians. In the old days, we used to be savages, but that's gone. Now it's drunks and noble Indians. I like the white men better who think we're all drunks. At least they're looking at us as people. They're saying what they see. Then when they meet one of us who's not drunk, they have to deal with us.... The ones who see us all as wisse men don't care about the Indians at all. They just care about the idea of Indian. It's just another way of stunting our humanity and making us into a fantasy that fits the needs of white people." Neither Wolf nor Dog (On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder --- Tape transcriptions) by Kent Nerburn "An awkward term at best, "presentism" nevertheless names a malaise that plagues American discussions of anything and everything concerning the past: the widespread inability to make appropriate allowances for prevailing historical conditions. Douglas L. Wilson In the sixties, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia, I lived in a so-called third-world country. In those years and since, I have traveled in Asia and Africa through much of the so-called under-developled world. In the sixties and seventies I worked as a legal services lawyer on Chicago's West Side, representing primarily poor people in criminal and civil actions. Nothing I saw as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa or as a traveler in Africa and Asia comes close to matching the despair and misery that today strangles the American underclass. What was beginning to happen in the inner city in the sixties and early seventies was mild compared to what occurs now I consider myself a liberal. And I'm proud to be a liberal, though I dread the direction in which many so-called liberals have gone. Actually I view the liberal left as reactionary -- conservative -- because they refuse to question any of their cherished opinions or even consider countervailing evidence.... ... By criticizing liberals I do not inferentially suggest that the right holds the answer. If the left is ideologically bankrupt, the right is intellectually dead." "Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children" (1997) by Patrick T. Murphy, Public Guardian of Cook County, Illinois (In 1855) la Ley Lerdo obliged the Church to sell its lands with sales tax going to the state. Speculators snapped up lands. The educational and charitable functions which the Church carried on among Indios ceased. For all its encouragement of superstition and reverence for the existing order, the religious corporations never, as the liberals came to admit, matched the rapacity and cruelty of the new private owners. The Ley Lerdo, in the name of progress, caused a further barbarization of the countryside. from "Fire and Blood" by T.R. Fehrenbach "I have prayed to the Lord every day. It's just so sad that someone could take such beautiful children. I have put all my trust and faith in the Lord that he will bring them home to us." Susan Smith, after accusing a black man of kidnapping her children and before it was discovered she had rolled the car containing them into a lake where they drowned. I just wish they'd give me one speck of proof that this world of theirs couldn't have been set up and handled better by a half dozen idiots bound hand and foot at the bottom of a ten mile well. Kenneth Patchen It is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity. Cherríe Moraga Life is that which --- pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially --- interrupts. Cynthia Ozick Whenever an interruption occurred, St. Frances de Sales immediately set aside what he was doing. Then, he greeted his interruptor with good humor and a deep sense of gratitude. Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. John Lennon St. John of the Cross, alone in his room in profound prayer, experienced a rapturous vision of Mary. At the same moment, he heard a beggar rattling at his door for alms. He wrenched himself away and saw to the beggar's needs. When he returned, the vision returned again, saying that at the very moment he had heard the door rattle on its hinges, his soul had hung in perilous balance. Had he not gone to the beggar's aid, she could never have appeared to him again. David Whyte Dante says that the journey begins right here. In the middle of the road. Right beneath your feet. This is the place. There is no other place and no other time. Even if you are successful and follow the road you have set yourself, you can never leave here. Despite everything you have achieved, life refuses to grant you immunity from its difficulties. Becoming aware of this after a lifetime of accepting success as the ultimate healing balm is, declares Dante, like waking up in a dark wood. David Whyte If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. I this good news? Robert Anthony Wishing to be known only for what one really is, is like putting on an old, easy, comfortable garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, "Here I am --- just so ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous. Take me or leave me...." It is like a great burden rolled off a man's back when he comes to want to appear nothing that he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his own, and to wait for something strong and deep within him or behind him to work through him. David Grayson Did you ever see little dogs caressing and playing with one another? So that you might say there is nothing more friendly? But, that you may know what friendship is, throw a bit of flesh among them, and you will learn. Epictetus The world is divided into people who thing they are right. Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey. Marcel Proust I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickkness is a place, more instructive than a long rtrip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies. Flannery O'Connor No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the causes of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs; we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power. P.J. O'Rourke Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. Frances FitzGerald Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Anatole France It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so. Felix Okoye At the structural level, most authentic work is not so much "doing," but "undoing." I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. Jay Gould, Railroad Owner, before 1886 strike on his Southwestern system Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other. An English journalist observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. (Quoted by Annie Dillard) "The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of," Mao told Nehru. "China has many people..... The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China's population. Does Mao's reckoning shock me really? If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter's life, would I do it? Probably. How many others' lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three? Three hundred million?" Annie Dillard Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell. Walter Bagehot A full belly does not believe in hunger. Italian proverb Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of civilization. Who cares whether Caesar stole or Caesare Borgia cheated?.... The real evil that follows a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. John J. Chapman Don't confuse having a career with having a life. They are not the same. First Lady Hillary Clinton, delivering Howard University's commencement speech Did you ever notice that when the other driver is going slower than you are he's a moron, and when he's going faster he's a maniac? George Carlin Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. Terry Tempest Williams True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. Clarence Darrow Every adult, no matter how unfortunate a childhood he had or how habit-ridden he may be, is free to make choices about his life. To say of Hitler, to say of the criminal, that he did not choose to be bad but was a victim of his upbringing is to make all morality, all discussion of right and wrong, impossible. It leaves unanswered the question of why people in similar circumstances did not all become Hitlers. But worse, to say "It is not his fault; he was not free to choose" is to rob a person of his humanity, and reduce him to the level of an animal who is bound by instinct. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace. Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved. Barbara Johnson It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love. Thomas Sowell For an anthropologist, the widespread failure to marry is a sign of impending disaster In Africa there is a saying: "They are our enemies, and so we marry them." Marriage helps families multiply their economic capital --- and, perhaps even more important, their social capital. You and your wife's uncle may not like each other, but marriage imposes a set of reciprocal obligations; you are at least partly responsible for each other's well-being. David Murray The fundamental task of education in a democracy is what Tocqueville once called the apprenticeship of liberty: learning to be free. I wonder whether Americans still believe liberty has to be learned and that its skills are worth learning. Or have they been deluded by two centuries of rhetoric into thinking that freedom is "natural" and can be taken for granted? The claim that men are born free, upon which America was founded, is at best a promising fiction. In real life, as every parent knows, children are born fragile, born needy, born ignorant, born unformed, born weak, born foolish, born dependent --- born in chains. We acquire our freedom over time, if at all Liberal-arts education actually means education in the arts of liberty; the "servile arts" were the trades learned by unfree men in the Middle Ages, the vocational education of their day... Jefferson and Adams both understood that the Bill of Rights offered little protection in a nation without informed citizens. However, once educated (and not merely instructed in the performance of a trade) a people was safe from even the subtlest tyrannies. Jefferson's democratic proclivities rested on his conviction that education could turn a people into a safe refuge -- indeed "the only safe depository" for the ultimate powers of society. "Cherish therefore the spirit of our people," he wrote to Edward Carrington in 1787, "and keep alive their attention. Do not be severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves." We have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility. We have de-coupled rights from civic responsibilities and severed citizenship from education on the false assumption that citizens just happen. We have forgotten that the "public" in public schools means not just paid for by the public but procreative of the very idea of a public.... Benjamin Barber .... in a world where doing nothing has such dire consequences, complacency has become a greater sin than malevolence... Benjamin Barber "I'd be happy to give him (oral sex) just to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Former Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh, discussing an article in Mirabella magazine in which she recalled a willingness to be "ravished by the President" after playing hearts with him on Air Force One. Newsweek, July 20, 1998 I had only one stock and I figured out that if the stock hit a certain point, I was going to be a billionaire. I was still in the tiny office where I was when I was worth a few million. I couldn't tell anyone at the office. All of my friends were working at the company --- the highest-paid person made about $100,000.00 -- and I was so much richer than my other friends in Atlanta that I couldn't tell them, because they'd think I was bragging. So I went home and told my wife, and she said, "I don't care, I've got to help the kids with their homework." No one even cared. I thought bells and whistles would go off. Nothing happened at all. Having great wealth is one of the most disappointing things. It's overrated, I can tell you that. It's not as good as average sex. Average sex is better than being a billionaire. Ted Turner According to Chesterton, tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything. Chesterton meant that as a critique of tolerance. But it captures nicely the upside of unbelief: where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution. When it is believed that on your religion hangs the fate of your immortal soul, the Inquisition follows easily; when it is believed that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes easily. After all, we don't persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods? Oddly, though, in our thoroughly secularized culture, there is one form of religious intolerance that does survive. And that is the disdain bordering on contempt of the culture makers for the deeply religious, i.e., those for whom religion is not a preference but a conviction. A letter fragment from Erik Schultes' friends who are homesteading in Norway Charity is no substitute for justice witheld. Augustine of Hippo Modern "productive" institutions at the same time foster and mask invidious individualism, something the subsistence-oriented institutions of all past ages were designed to reduce and to expose... The history of economic individualism coincides with the modernization of envy. In this essay, I discuss the appearance of a new kind of envy, characteristic of the relations between the sexes, one that arises only as gender fades from a society... Malevolent disparagement between men and women is not a new social phenomenon; the institutionalization of lifelong invidious comparison between genderless individuals is historically unprecedented. Ivan Illich, "Gender" People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it. John Steinbeck |
