The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.
As proof that HOW we see things matters, Gen. Montgomery took a preprepared text that had been deemed an innocuous complement to his American troops and delivered it in such a way that his condescension prompted more division than unity.
Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that mat...
So many important New York musicians were gay, one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern.
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most prec...
It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernic...
You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought, so far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the...
I'm not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I'm grateful to her for. She made me read 'War and Peace.' The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can't walk round reading 'War and Peac...
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,
The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.
The one ring road around the airfield is paved, but heavily rutted and potholed. Every few days a street-sweeper makes its way around, polishing the rutted surface with brushes and water.
This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars - the last or the next.
Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The war on drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American war on words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock ...
Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting t...
When it comes to happiness, our soul is like a colander, a tire with a nail in it, our grandfather's memory. It feels like there is a homeless person inside of us, wandering around pushing a shopping cart.
The balancing act we parents attempt is convincing our children: 1. You are loved more than you can imagine. 2. The world does not revolve around you.
She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turn...
It's always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation....Why do men behave the way they do, warring?" "What do you think?" he asked. "Maybe because they've got no sens...
More than any of us, she had written her own story; yet she could not wash it out with all her tears, return to her victims what she had torn from them, and by so doing, save herself...
