Journalists from New York City

"I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team."

"I like champagne—because it always tastes like my foot's asleep."

"A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it."

"The powder is mixed with water and tastes exactly like powder mixed with water."

"Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new...program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was."

"People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him."

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."

"Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, "I am not a crook." Jimmy Carter says, "I have lusted after women in my heart." President Reagan says, "I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.""

"If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it."

"People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, "I'm getting even." … For me, being funny is the best revenge."

"Don't commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later."

"Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got."

"I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies."

"The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret."

"The bad boy tweaking the nose of the Establishment [with] the countenance of a Jewish leprechaun."

"What Art had was the gift of laughter — that's a rarity today. He could take simple ordinary things and make you laugh. God knows all of us need that. I've been with him in all kinds of situations, good and bad, triumph and tragedy but Art always was able to see a little wisp of humor in everything."

"Art was the Mark Twain of our time. For decades there was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art's column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously. The special art of Art Buchwald was to make even the worst of times better."

"The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor, but that he made you smile."

"Three of us — Bill Styron, he and I — suffered depression simultaneously, so we walked around in the rain together on Martha's Vineyard and consoled each other... He did the best to make life palatable, to help you be optimistic, to let you know he believed you would beat it. We both did, and so did Bill. We named ourselves the 'Blues Brothers.'"

"Africa is a mess. It is a mess by any civilized measure of human progress. It is a mess by most uncivilized measures of human progress."

"Great civilizations create great cathedrals, and the cathedrals of this generation should be in outer space. Cathedrals inspire rich and poor people alike to believe great things are possible. The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more — perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice."

"[[Conservatism|[C]onservatism]] is not supposed to be against change or progress... It is supposed to be skeptical of grandiose or reckless schemes which throw out the good in pursuit of the perfect."

"Imagine if a friend, or even a son or brother, told you, "Hey, guess what I did last night? I stole a car and then I stole a cop car, I shot at some cops (presumably family men), and resisted arrest every step of the way." My response would be: A) "I hope they beat your ass"; B) "Gee, did they beat your ass?"; C) "How come they didn't beat your ass?"; or D) "Come with me right now so I can take you down to the station so they can beat your ass." There is no E) none of the above."

"If you're too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn't advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn't assume he's a Nazi and you should know it's pretty damn evil to call him one."

"A rising economic tide is bad for people who live off of the poverty of others."

"One of the main reasons American liberals adore Europe is that Europe still worships its intellectuals. In America, intellectuals are mostly for entertainment. But across the pond, these folks get to do real damage. Why, just this spring a small Italian village had its barbershop cited by the local magistrate because its shaving brushes did not conform to the standard set by the European Union. I am not making this up."

"There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems."

"Boredom is a powerful incentive to come up with bad ideas, especially for intellectuals. "Capitalism," says Irving Kristol, "is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived." The reason it's so unromantic is that it doesn't tell people what to do and that can be very frustrating for intellectuals who want to tell people what to do. Indeed, court intellectuals have always been more influential where the people are less free, because when an intellectual persuades a dictator or a socialist prime minister (a small distinction to be sure), their advice gets translated into reality. When an intellectual says, "It would be a better society if all beer was free" a free-market politician would, or at least should, say "Maybe, but what can I do about it?""

"Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies."

"DOGS, KIDDIE PORN & STAR TREK: (Hey, that’s a good book title). Unfortunately, I was out with Cosmo when the conversation got interesting around here. First of all, while I think it is wrong to judge dogs by human political categories they most certainly aren’t liberals. Dogs may try to run your life, but they do not much care about running the lives of people they’ve never met. And still, they are willing to judge others -- and admit it. They are morally pragmatic, loyal and willing to share with family while outraged or flummoxed by the idea of taxation for the benefit of people or dogs they don’t know. They firmly believe in sexual harassment as a modus vivendi. They believe nature is a tool. They are not vegetarians and reject animal rights. They chuff at egalitarianism. In short, I think they are Monarchists; they believe in something very close to a Great Chain of Being with humans and dogs at the top (and, even at the top humans and dogs have different ranks)."

"An idiot is no smarter if a billion people agree with him and a genius is no dumber if a billion people don't."

"I think Rummy should walk up to the table, take the oath, offer his prepared apologies and explanations and then, at the end of his remarks, he should take out a long Japanese knife. He should then cut off his pinky. If this Yakuza style contrition doesn't work he should look to the ranking Democrat on the committee and continue removing fingers until he gets a Shogun-like nod that his offering is acceptable. He should then wrap-up up his hand, curtly bow, and then say 'I am now pleased to take your questions.'"

"My first piece of advice — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — is that we should not get so carried away that we adopt a Logan's Run policy in which conservatives beyond a certain age are twirled around the ceiling of a big stadium and then blown-up to the cheers of younger conservatives."

"I bet you anything I could destroy Milton Friedman in a debate about economics — so long as the audience was comprised of five year olds. He may have a Nobel Prize, but I can make offensive sounds with my armpit. Advantage: Goldberg!"

"I suppose in John Kerry's world good diplomacy lets the boys in the bar finish raping the girl for fear of causing a fuss. Okay, that was unfair."

"Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won't he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why . . . why . . . why? There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God."

"In John Kerry's world, it's a defense to say your oldest friends aren't dishonest, they're merely whores."

"Disenfranchisement is something the government does to you. It's not something you do to yourself. If you can't figure out how to fill in the ovals or punch the chads—and some minority of voters will always botch it—that doesn't mean your right to vote was rescinded. It means that you didn't take your right to vote seriously enough to pay attention to the instructions."

"Take the two leading liberal columnists at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. As we all know, one's a whining self-parody of a hysterical liberal who lets feminine emotion and fear defeat reason and fact in almost every column. The other used to date Michael Douglas."

"“[Thanksgiving is] my favorite holiday, I think. It's without a doubt my favorite American Holiday. I love Christmastime, Chanuka etc. But Thanksgiving is as close as we get to a nationalist holiday in America (a country where nationalism as a concept doesn't really fit). Thanksgiving's roots are pre-founding, which means its not a political holiday in any conventional sense. We are giving thanks for the soil, the land, for the gifts of providence which were bequeathed to us long before we figured out our political system. Moreover, because there are no gifts, the holiday isn't nearly so vulnerable to materialism and commercialism. It's about things -- primarily family and private accomplishments and blessings -- that don't overlap very much with politics of any kind. We are thankful for the truly important things: our children and their health, for our friends, for the things which make life rich and joyful. As for all the stuff about killing Indians and whatnot, I can certainly understand why Indians might have some ambivalence about the holiday (though I suspect many do not). The sad -- and fortunate -- truth is that the European conquest of North America was an unremarkable old world event (one tribe defeating another tribe and taking their land; happened all the time) which ushered in a gloriously hopeful new age for humanity. America remains the last best hope for mankind. Still, I think it would be silly to deny how America came to be, but the truth makes me no less grateful that America did come to be. Also, I really, really like the food."

"I consider the Fourth a patriotic holday more than a nationalist one. We are celebrating the signing of a text, the establishment of a set of laws and principles on the Fourth of July. The Fourth is about political liberty and national independence. It is, for all its pomp and circumstance, a fairly secular and rational holiday. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving plays upon the mystic chords of memory and is prior to and independent of many of things we celebrate on the Fourth. Anyway, I agree its a fair criticism and probably just highlights different perspectives. And, yes, the food on the Fourth of July is really, really good. I am all about hotdogs, beer and barbecue."

"Why is it fair game to question conservatives' love or loyalty to children or to their fellow man, but beyond the pale to question liberals' love of country?"

"I do think my judgment is superior to (Juan Cole's) when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now)."

"I'd love to have a complete, easy to access collection of quotes-by-me somewhere out there. Why? I dunno. Because it'd be even cooler?"

"I wish to hearby announce that Wikipedia represents the highest, greatest, achievements of human life to date. I shall henceforth replace the phrase "the greatest thing since sliced bread" with the phrase "the greatest thing since Wikipedia." That is so long as what it posts about me is accurate or at least inaccurately extremely flattering."

"Everywhere, unthinking mobs of "independent thinkers" wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them."

"The porkbusters fight is fun now, but not since early cave men tried to train grizzly bears to give them tongue-baths has a project seemed more obviously doomed to end in disappointment. Expecting Congress — of either party — to give back pork which has already been approved and passed into law is like expecting crack whores to give refunds days after services have been rendered."

"Making meaningful distinctions is not hypocrisy, it's called "thinking.""

"But, the people who criticized these people were … what? I am so disgusted with people who think free speech is defined as being able to say what you think without being criticized."

"[I]n many respects fascism not only is here but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism--the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism--is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism... Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today's liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism."

"Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common goal. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism... You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good, or revolutions can be bad."

"In short, “social justice” is code for good things no one needs to argue for -- and no one dare be against."

"I'll never tire of the people so vexed by me they have to insist I am irrelevant. I may be irrelevant, but I clearly matter to you."

"The world's oldest globalist institution? Catholic church."

"States have a habit of forming when the rules say “line starts here for free stuff.” Whoever manages the line becomes the “state” after a while."

"We often dismiss controversies or concerns by waving our hands and saying something like, “Oh, that’s merely symbolic,” as if the meaning we give to symbols is somehow irrelevant compared with more tangible things. But symbolism — the way we reduce broad concerns, agendas, and visions to images or rituals — has played a defining role in human life since there have been humans. Try burning a flag or a cross in front of the wrong audience and then tell me symbolism is nothing."

"Both flag burners and flag wavers can agree on one thing: The flag has meaning beyond the merely instrumental necessity of having a piece of cloth that identifies a legal jurisdiction."

"The rifts between Shia and Sunni, Eastern Orthodox and Catholic, Israelis and Palestinians, Tibetans and Chinese, obviously have real political, theological, or economic substance behind them, but they are often reduced to symbolism. If you study the history of nationalism, it is often a story of symbols. What flag shall we fly? What icon shall we mount? What books will we revere — or burn?"

"One of the things that motivated my old friend Andrew Breitbart was his righteous indignation at being called a racist. That's a running theme in his book, "Righteous Indignation"."

"He would also advise conservatives not to be deterred if their opponents on the left unfairly called them racists — something he rightly believed happened all the time. Indeed, one of the things that got him out of bed in the morning was fighting the media-Democratic narrative that conservatives are all a bunch of racists."

"In one famous episode, members of the Congressional Black Caucus walked through a crowd of tea party protesters seeking a provocation. Subsequently they claimed the attendants screamed the N-word and other epithets at them. The press reported it all as fact. Andrew, noting the sea of cameras and iPhones at the event, offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could provide proof of the CBC's claims. No one came forward. That was the Andrew Breitbart I was proud to call my friend."

"If Andrew were still around, I bet he'd tell Bannon to stay in Europe — and not just because his tendency to wear several shirts seems more consistent with European fashion. Bannon's understanding of conservatism is entirely European."

"Conservatism in America has always been deeply traditionalist, sometimes too much so. But at the core of the modern conservative movement has been the effort to protect, defend and conserve the traditions of a liberal revolution, grounded in the best arguments of the enlightenment (slavery notwithstanding). Bannon's potted blood and soil nationalism and racially tinged populism runs counter to that project and the best and highest ideals of conservatism and America itself. He turned Andrew's Breitbart.com into a "platform" (his word) for the alt-right seeking to inject European swill into the American body politic. Let him stay in Europe and hand out torches for the marchers. His un-American schtick has no place here. I'm sure Andrew would agree."

"Life isn't binary — and neither is politics. If you are adrift in the ocean, your enemy isn’t just sharks; it’s thirst, hunger, drowning, and despair itself. If you face your predicament assuming the only thing you have to worry about is being eaten by a shark, you might fend off the sharks, but you will also probably die. Indeed, by ignoring other threats, you’d probably make yourself more vulnerable to a shark attack."

"[W]e live in a popular-front moment, where no one on “our side” is worth criticizing too much, if at all, and everyone on “their side” is evil. This has as much to do with ratings and page views as it does with ideology. Moths chase light, but the incentive for politicians, producers, and pundits is to follow the heat. I’m still torn over how people such as Mark Zuckerberg should deal with slanderous carnival barkers like Alex Jones. But I’m convinced a lot of people are to blame for the problem reaching Zuckerberg’s desk in the first place."

"[N]early every political evil can be found on display in China: slavery, discrimination, religious persecution, xenophobia, tyranny, mass-political indoctrination, colonialism, cultural genocide, and so on. And yet, the outcry against these things in America and the West is a tiny fraction of what it was with regard to South Africa in the 1980s or Israel today. Why? Some of the political answers are pretty obvious — and have much merit. A few that come to mind: China is non-Western, and many of these sins are supposed to be unique to white Europeans; China is a victim (or “victim”) of colonialism, and so we shouldn’t judge it harshly; China is very powerful, and realpolitik dictates that we be diplomatic; and so on."

"The coalition instinct is the programming that helped us form strategic groups that advance our self-interest. We are a social species and cooperation is what helped us skyrocket to the top of the food chain."

"[L]iberals are going to have to make peace with the possibility that their political enemies aren’t always the cartoon villains they so desperately want them to be."

"For Obama, and millions of liberals, Trump is the fruition of years of right-wing perfidy. He has more of a point than many of my colleagues on the right care to admit. For instance, I never subscribed to the “birther” conspiracy theory that Trump exploited to such effect, but I failed to appreciate the damage being done by letting it fester. But Obama also has a massive blind spot that many on the left share. The tit-for-tat dynamic of norm-breaking goes back decades, and Obama has played his part. When running for president in 2008 and 2012, Obama let his lieutenants demonize John McCain and Mitt Romney as racists."

"Obama violated not just democratic norms but also his constitutional oath by effectively granting amnesty to millions of immigrants in the country illegally despite having insisted that he did not have the power to do so."

"Pence has a point. But he has little standing to make it."

"Falsely accusing critics of “treason,” castigating law-enforcement agencies for prosecuting allies, and telling police they should rough up suspects is inconsistent with Trump’s oath — and Pence’s. But these days, oaths, like norms, are for everybody else."

"[S]egments of the Right, who denounced phrases like “economic patriotism” when it passed Barack Obama’s lips but nod and cheer when similar phrases come out of the mouths of “nationalists.” They see the state as the key to fostering a new social solidarity because it alone speaks for their new idol — or “strong god” — of the Nation. Passionate nationalists, like passionate socialists, ultimately believe that the State can love you, and if the right people take it over, the divisions that are inevitable in a free society will be knitted together by some government initiative. But that is not love, it is lust. It is a lust for power and victory for your vision over all others."

"One common tactic [socialists like to use] is to point to countries that liberals like and dub them real-world models of socialism. Thus Scandinavian countries with generous social safety nets become the real-world proof that socialism works. Others will just point to government-run programs or institutions—national parks, the VA, whatever—and say “socialism!” (What about Venezuela? “Shut up,” they explain.)"

"[S]ocialism has never been a particularly stable or coherent program, a point I made in these pages in 2010. It has always been best defined as whatever socialists want it to be at any given moment. That is because its chief utility is as a romantic indictment of the capitalist status quo. As many of the defenders of the new socialist craze admit, socialism is the off-the-shelf alternative to capitalism, which has been in bad odor since at least the financial crisis of 2008."

"[S]ocialism’s durability as a concept owes almost nothing to economics and almost everything to the desire for power..."

"[T]o talk about socialism as a function of practical politics means gliding past its underlying appeal. After all, there are countless other ideologies that can be similarly reduced to the desire for power expressed by certain elites or certain segments of the aggrieved masses themselves. The most obvious example is, of course, nationalism, which has more in common with socialism than is ordinarily believed. From the French Jacobins to the Italian Fascists, nationalists tend to be in favor of state-directed economics, the redistribution of wealth, and a collectivist or communal organization of society. What unites all of these movements is a sense that liberal democratic capitalism doesn’t provide a sense of social solidarity. It is too atomizing, too cut-throat, and mostly unconcerned with how we should all live together."

"Socialism as a thoroughgoing system had failed. But the central emotion behind it had not. And that emotion has only deepened..."

"Millennials who supported Bernie Sanders almost certainly don’t care about the weedy specifics of his health-care plans. They do not want to live in a country with an economic system that could never have produced the iPhone or the Internet. What they want is a greater sense of social solidarity."

"Capitalism—at least as Sanders & Co. understand it—is not fulfilling. It doesn’t provide a sense of meaning and solidarity. It rewards—in their minds—the few and punishes the many. There must be a better, more humane way, in which we’re all in it together and sacrifice is shared. The word “social” comes from the Latin socii, meaning allies. People want to feel that they are allied with one another, fighting toward a common goal together for the good of the tribe, marching to the same drumbeats. This is innate in us. Our tribal brains crave social solidarity every bit as much as our palates crave foods that are sweet, fatty, or salty. We can train ourselves to resist the cravings or channel them toward productive ends. But very few of us can eliminate the craving itself."

"The problem is that the central government in a sprawling country of over 325 million can’t provide solidarity (without resorting to anti-democratic means)—only the institutions of civil society (faith, family, etc.) can fill the holes in our souls."

"The major difference between the left and the right when it comes to any movement dedicated to overthrowing the free-market order—corporatist, authoritarian, etc.—is which groups will be the winners and which groups will be the losers. A left-wing system might empower labor leaders, government bureaucrats, progressive intellectuals, universities, certain minority groups, and one set of industries. A right-wing system might reward a different set of industries as well as traditional religious groups and their leaders, an ethnic majority, aristocrats, or perhaps rural interests. But both systems would be reactionary in the sense that they rejected the legacy of the Lockean revolution..."

"[W]hat makes a libertarian in America a “right-winger” makes him a “liberal” in most of Europe."

"[C]apitalism is as much to blame for the consolidation and homogenization of nations as champions of progressive central planning are, if not more so."

"As America’s Founders well understood, a society enjoying a multiplicity of institutions, interests, and intact communities (i.e., factions) is much more difficult to subjugate by a single central power, be it a king, a dictator, or a bureaucracy."

"We can debate how much socialism there was in Hitler’s National Socialism. It is remarkable, however, that many of the people insisting that Norway or Sweden is obviously socialist even though they both are more free-market than Hitlerite Germany are aghast at the suggestion that the National Socialists were…socialists."

"The sense of local community, the feeling of espirit de corps, the satisfaction one gets from belonging to a settled traditional or even tribal order, and the feeling of centeredness and place one gets in the family: These are all wonderful things. But they can, and often do, become poisonous, oppressive, and even tyrannical when the state tries to impose them on the entirety of society. When we try to make the macrocosm of society like the microcosm of the family or tribe, we destroy it every bit as much as when we try to make the microcosm operate according to the rules of the macrocosm."

"After the rise of socialism and the retreat of monarchical and clerical rule, liberalism became, in effect, the new conservatism in that it took on the mantle of the status quo."

"Progressives have won so many policy battles by relying on activist courts to do things they could not achieve at the ballot box, they’ve come to see an activist Supreme Court as a birthright. As a result, the Court has been politicized far more than it should be."

"Judges are not typically expected to remain dispassionate when they’ve been accused of gang rape, nor should they be."

"This is how we got here. It will get worse because there are no incentives to be better. It won’t end well either, but at least it will feel familiar."

"[T]he U.N. is the best arena in the world for picking the right enemies."

"At the end of the day, happiness is derived from love — love for others and others’ love for you. When I say “love” I do not mean simply romantic love, though that is obviously one of the greatest wellsprings of true happiness. I mean the love one feels from friends, and the love for places and things that brings people together for shared purpose."

"The modern doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism are a kind of homogenizing totalitarianism. Its acolytes want every institution to be filled with people who look different but think alike. What our society needs is not more “diversity” of this sort but more variety. Different communities and institutions need to be able live differently, because it is only with this kind of variety that a diverse people can find places where they all feel at home and where they can all find a kind of meaning that suits them as individuals."

"[I]nstitutions and communities need to be able to exploit their comparative advantages. It’s not just that the Marine Corps demands more from its members than the Peace Corps; it’s that the Marines demand different things. For some people, being a Marine would be a kind of living Hell; for others it is a reason to live. That’s what the individual pursuit of happiness means."

"One of the great things about liberalism is that it allows for more paths for just that pursuit. In tribal society, there was little to no division of labor beyond what was rooted in age and sex. In feudal monarchies and modern totalitarianisms alike, there is division of labor, but it is imposed on people by rulers: “You will be a soldier.” “You will be a fry cook.” “You were born to be a slave or a serf.” In a free society, you have choice. It’s not perfect: You can’t choose to be a Marine if you do not meet the requirements, but you are free to try."

"[T]here has never been a society in all of human history where the average person did not have to work. Sure, some crapulent prince could lay around all day and do nothing, but everyone else had to till the soil or pound the anvil or carry a spear."

"[W]ork is good. Work is virtuous and inculcates virtue. Work gives people a sense of meaning and of being needed. Obviously, not everyone feels such satisfaction in the job they have now, but that dissatisfaction is precisely the motivation people need to find the job that might provide it. That motivation inspires virtue, too."

"Some people work just to make the money to support the other things in their life that provide meaning, be it a family or a cause or a hobby that may seem silly to you or me but is central to their individual pursuit of happiness. Some people don’t work for money at all. Priests, stay-at-home parents, and volunteers in a thousand different institutions aren’t pursuing wealth; they are pursuing meaning through love and love through meaning."

"[S]ocialists are romantics in that they want to curate their lives entirely based on their own feelings."

"The only society in which it is remotely possible for people to design their lives in the manner Marx fantasizes is one that is incredibly rich and incredibly free. We are nowhere near there yet, but it’s worth pointing out that if you plucked any laborer from another era and toured him or her around America today, they’d think that we were remarkably close."

"I understand that identity-politics arguments are supposed to trump everything else these days, but the idea that all Americans of Asian, black, and Hispanic heritage have homogeneous political interests and identities is both ridiculous and grotesque."

"Everyone’s decrying tribalism, and yet the idea that we should rejigger the constitutional order to make sure that Asian Americans in California have the same “representation” in the Senate as Hispanics in, say, Texas or Rhode Island is profoundly tribal. Maybe Hispanics in Texas have different political interests than Hispanics in California? Maybe Hispanics — an incredibly diverse category of people — don’t vote based upon an abstract designation?"

"[B]ending the system to the idea that the government in Washington should see the country as a bunch of competing racial and ethnic groups with no particular or meaningful attachment to place and community, whose only relationship to government is unmediated through state and local government, is precisely the sort of thinking that Arthur Schlesinger lamented... If it makes you sad that California doesn’t have more clout in the Senate, fine. But playing statistical games based on race and ethnicity is a pernicious way of approaching that problem."

"Look, I know very well there are many kinds of socialism. But wherever socialism has teeth, it veers closer to gangsterism because it depends on the use of arbitrary power, either by the state or, in essence, the mob. If you really want economic equality, you need to take money from people who earned it and give it to, or spend it on, people who didn’t. “Fighting income inequality” doesn’t change the fact that the state is using force based upon an aesthetic conceit about how society should look."

"Keeping Germany from acting too German (or at least too Prussian) is an important lesson of history."

"The piece was opinion, the news was fact captured on film."

"One of the things I tell new parents is something that was told to me when my daughter still had that new-baby smell: “Prepare for long days but short years.” No statement more succinctly captures the exhaustion, excitement, and melancholy nostalgia that come with parenthood. I have no doubt whole books have not covered it more eloquently."

"[T]he immediate assumption that praise for, or pride in, Western civilization is a species of bigotry and racism is a perfect example of the sort of civilizational suicide I describe in my own book on the subject."

"But the weird thing is that many of the people who are outraged by benign nationalism or the benign pan-nationalism that is pride in Western civilization take no umbrage when someone from Iran or China says they think their civilization is best. This of course is a manifestation of the ancient cult of identitarianism, which the best traditions of the West have battled internally at great cost for thousands of years. Saying Western civilization is great hurts the feelings of some people invested in some other source of identity. And it hurts the feelings of some Westerners because they think it’s a sign of enlightenment to get offended on other people’s behalf or to denigrate the society that gave them their soap box."

"We “borrow” stuff from other cultures constantly, starting with Christianity itself. This is particularly true of America, which is why our menus read like the requested meal plans from a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. This profound lack of self-awareness manifests itself most acutely among progressives who wear their Europe-envy on their sleeves. Oh, they’re so much more civilized over there. Well, what civilization do you think “over there” is part of?"

"The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context. Conservatism is gratitude..."

"So I had basically caught the editors of the National Review in bald-faced lies about taking money from Big Tech companies like Google to remain silent while those same Big Tech companies censored and de-platformed other conservatives. This was, of course, an unconscionable betrayal for The Flagship Conservative Magazine to commit against its own readers — but they did it anyway. Meanwhile, I was hearing from sources close to the National Review Board that the loss of donors and subscribers was so serious that drastic action would need to be taken. (The magazine had lost about half of its subscriber base in less than two years.) The board was also adamant that Jonah Goldberg and David French were the main culprits behind the astonishing collapse of the magazine's influence, and that they needed to go. Everybody wanted them off the masthead in order to survive."

"Goldberg was very touchy about the idea that he had been removed from the magazine. He wanted people to know that it was his idea to leave the National Review to fax out a newsletter from his basement (with no name and no money) along with Stephen Hayes. The Drag Queen Story Hour enthusiast David French even tweeted: "There's news. There's fake news. Then there's the absolute premium-grade BS I'm reading on MAGA Twitter and elsewhere claiming that Jonah Goldberg was pushed out of National Review. Completely, totally false." What made this so funny was that David French was himself removed from the magazine a few months later! Where did he go? Well, he went to work for Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes and their little newsletter of course. The three of them were now free to plummet into new depths of unpopularity together. The most intellectually bankrupt and vitriolic of the Never Trumpers had finally been thrown into the dustbin of history."

"No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand."

"Television makes so much at its worst that it can't afford to do its best."

"Television was supposed to be a national park. (Instead) it has become a money machine... It’s a commodity now, just like pork bellies."

"A composite is a euphemism for a lie. It's disorderly. It's dishonest and it's not journalism."

"I have a motto: My job is not to make up anybody's mind but to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking."

"What we don't know as a nation and as a citizen can kill us."

"You gotta be willing to be lucky."

"Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."

"Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces; marriage is also three meals a day, sharing the workload and remembering to carry out the trash."

"Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the cruelest words."

"I don’t give advice. I can’t tell anybody what to do. Instead I say this is what we know about this problem at this time. And here are the consequences of these actions."

"Don’t fool yourself that you are going to have it all. You are not. Psychologically, having it all is not even a valid concept. The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have, the more we want. And for this reason, we never have it all."

"Trust your hunches... Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Warning! Do not confuse your hunches with wishful thinking. This is the road to disaster."

"In each of us are places where we have never gone. Only by pressing the limits do you ever find them."

"When you look at your life the greatest happinesses are family happinesses."

"When you come right down to it, the secret of having it all is loving it all."

"No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you'd be more productive."

"We control fifty percent of a relationship. We influence one hundred percent of it."

"If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth."

"The best proof of love is trust."

"Before your dreams can come true, you have to have those dreams."

"Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable."

"Being taken for granted can be a compliment. It means that you've become a comfortable, trusted element in another person's life."

"Credit buying is much like being drunk. The buzz happens immediately and gives you a lift... The hangover comes the day after."

"No matter how love-sick a woman is, she shouldn't take the first pill that comes along."

"The world at large does not judge us by who we are and what we know; it judges us by what we have."

"Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success."

"The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top."

"An individual's self-concept is the core of his personality. It affects every aspect of human behavior: the ability to learn, the capacity to grow and change. A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success in life."

"Those who have easy, cheerful attitudes tend to be happier than those with less pleasant temperaments, regardless of money, "making it", or success."

"Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can — and surely will at times — fail. Other vulnerabilities, like being embarrassed or risking love, can be terrifying, too. I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk."

"Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery."

"If your energy is as boundless as your ambition, total commitment may be a way of life you should seriously consider."

""Our family comes first" Strong families support each other's dreams; they sacrifice to show support. A friend turned down a company trip to the Bahamas so he could attend his son's championship soccer game. "the beach will always be there," he said, "but my son won't always be 14 and team captain." this "family first" attitude begins with a bond of loyalty between marital partners. But single-parent families (28% of all families with children, according to the latest census) can be just as successful in raising strong children if they develop a "family first" attitude."

"Strong families use the word "we" a lot, but "I" is never forgotten. Family members know they have the freedom to go off on their own, even if the direction is one that "we" have never followed before. The family message is, "We're behind you, so you can be you.""

"While parents are naturally in a leadership role, strong families strive to share decision-making. They resolve differences by respecting other viewpoints and accepting compromise solutions. One family decided to spend money on a son's music lessons rather than replace worn carpeting. The compromise was to pitch in and clean the carpet. In another family, everyone but the youngest daughter loved to ski. They rented a vacation condo with plenty of activities for the daughter, and the skiers accepted an hour's drive to the slopes."

"In strong families, positive strokes out-number negative broadsides by a wide margin. Members regularly express appreciation: "Thanks for fixing the drainpipe." "You look so nice in that dress." "The dinner was great." Criticism is offered gently. After all, strong families figure, if we can be kind to strangers, why not to one another?"

""We treat each other well" In strong families, positive strokes outnumber negative broadsides by a wide margin. Members regularly express appreciation: "Thanks for fixing the drainpipe." "you look so nice in that dress." "The dinner was great" Criticism is offered gently. After all, strong families figure, if we can be kind to strangers, why not to one another."

"Strong families value their extended family, particularly grandparents. In one study of college students, a majority thought their interactions with grandparents reflected high family strengths. It’s important to create continuity between generations, passing along traditions and making roots ever stronger, so the tree continues to reach for the sun."

"Religious belief, trust, a sense of connection to the universe — no matter what you call it, there is a spiritual component to strong families. They see their lives as imbued with purpose, reflected in the things they do for one another and the community. Small problems provide a chance to grow; large ones are a lesson in courage. A mother whose son died of a brain tumor bravely returned to the hospital where he had died in order to set up a research fund. When she saw the parents of children who currently were suffering, she told her son’s doctor: "If any research you do produces any advance, my son’s passing won’t have been totally without purpose." It takes a certain type of spiritual grace to see beyond one’s own misery to the needs of others. Strong families try to live so they can look outward — and inward — every single day."

"Maybe Listening, not imitating, is the sincerest form of flattery."

"My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure."

"The old Old winds that blew When chaos was, what do They tell the clattered trees that I Should weep?"

"These be Three silent things: The falling snow...the hour Before the dawn...the mouth of one Just dead."

"Listen. With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall."

"I know Not these my hands And yet I think there was A woman like me once had hands Like these."

"[National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."

"The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity)."

"One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'."

"Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity. There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word."

"The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence."

"I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and liberals at bay. And the nation free."

"Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view."

"The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase."

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

"Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

"We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."

"It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand."

"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive."

"The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry."

"More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted. This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000."

"Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment."

"The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs."

"Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority."

"It is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors."

"I've always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian and when I found him he turned out to be a non-practicing Jew."

"They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm."

"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, "Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?" I couldn't think of anyone."

"Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. The laws concerning marijuana aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating. General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend."

"Oh yes, I won’t cavil on that point. The magazine has been everything the speakers tonight have so kindly said it was–is. It is preposterous to suppose that this is so because of my chancellorship. How gifted do you need to be to publish Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Keith Mano? But, yes, the journal needed to function. Somehow the staff and the writers had to be paid–if an editorial note is reserved for me in the encyclopedias, it will appear under the heading “Alchemy.” But the deficits were met, mostly, by our readers: by you. And, yes, we did as much as anybody with the exception of–Himself–to shepherd into the White House the man I am confident will emerge as the principal political figure of the second half of the 20th century, and he will be cherished, in the nursery tales told in future generations, as the American president who showed the same innocent audacity as the little boy who insisted that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes, back when he said, at a critical moment in history, that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an evil empire. It is my judgment that those words acted as a kind of harmonic resolution to the three frantic volumes of Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago told us everything we needed to know about the pathology of Soviet Communism. We were missing only the galvanizing summation; and we got it from President Reagan: and I think that the countdown for Communism began then."

"Skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious — indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief — how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration — near infinite — of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?"

"When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens. We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. ... In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception."

"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. ... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols. The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans."

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."

"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress, and in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge. There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable."

"Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you."

"It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance."

"I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon."

"Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me."

"Demand a recount."

"Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."

"They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's what happened."

"The idea to make New York City a state, in case you didn't know, is not original with me. There's been a long struggle for more "home rule," which, although it hasn't focused on statehood, has sought to get us more control over taxes, services and decision-making. Statehood was first proposed by the Mayor of New York in 1861; it was later advocated by such people as William Randolph Hearst and by William F. Buckley in his campaign for Mayor in 1965..."

"William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the great personalities of the United States of the last 50 years. He was the same in private as in public: urbane, humorous and always cordial. ... His humanity and gentlemanliness and unfailing courtesy, as well as his wit and erudition, enabled him to take positions that affronted the liberal conventional wisdom without attracting the venomous antagonism of its leaders. His close friends included such contrary spirits as John Kenneth Galbraith, Mario Cuomo and some of the Kennedys and Rockefellers."

"William F. Buckley was more than a journalist or commentator. He was the indisputable leader of the conservative movement that laid the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution. Every Republican owes him a debt of gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of our party and nation."

""The central question that emerges," the National Review's founding editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights of the modern era, "is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes-the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." He continued: "It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority." It was a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse-to give white political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself-reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural, and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy."

"We learned from our parents to prefer the good man to the brilliant man. It is a sacred humanity in people we respect. Our compassion is earned in the quality of the human condition. People are surprised to realize that we, princelings of Dame Fortune, as they feel us to be, tread the same hard interior landscape. And it may be this that comes through, that fascinates, because we do not presume, "Come, let us lead you," but, instead, petition, "Come, our philosophy is your way, the human way, and it is you who will and must lead yourselves…""

"America has lost one of its finest writers and thinkers. Bill Buckley was one of the great founders of the modern conservative movement. He brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America's victory in the Cold War and for the conservative movement that continues to this day."

"Jeffrey Hart suggested that Buckley was torn between his patrician roots and the populist temper of the movement he championed. An echt Burkean with a snob’s disdain for the contemporary Republican Party, Hart hinted at a road not taken, in which a Buckley-led conservative intelligentsia might have labored to infiltrate and convert the liberal-leaning Eastern Establishment, rather than making common cause with Sunbelt populists, Reagan Democrats and other faintly embarrassing constituencies. But it’s doubtful Buckley himself harbored such fantasies. From the beginning of his career, he seemed to grasp that any successful right-of-center politics in America would be populist, or it wouldn’t be at all. In post-New Deal America, with the welfare state firmly entrenched and the governing class squarely in the statist corner, conservatism’s obvious constituency was middle-class and put-upon, and its obvious purpose was to defend its constituents’ folkways and pocketbooks against sophisticates and social engineers. The establishment was solidly liberal, so the right needed to be anti-establishment; the alternative was the sidelines, or the fever swamps. The previous generation of conservative thinkers had chosen alienation, resentment, paranoia. Buckley chose populism — and with it, relevance."

"William F. Buckley, Jr. once made the famous pronouncement that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT. Now that we are ruled by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, you can see what he meant."

"Had there been no Buckley, there would likely have been no Reagan administration, no Morning in America, no “Tear down this wall,” and no Cold War triumph for liberty and the West. It may sometimes be confusing, what with all the intramural squabbling among libertarian conservatives, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, and the like, to know exactly what “conservatism” stands for these days. But Buckley more than anyone made clear that there are things it would not stand for."

"Bill was responsible for rejecting the and the other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism. ... Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country."

"He was really a quintessential leader of the conservative movement not just in New York but in the nation. There are no other Bill Buckleys now on the scene. On a personal level he was a very warm and kind individual."

"Even if you disagreed sharply with his positions, which were delivered in his slightly nasal tones, you knew that you had to do your homework before you took him on in any kind of debate. He was a font of wisdom, and he knew how to wield the language like a knight's sword."

"No other actor on earth can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep-school kid from next door, and the snows of yesteryear."

"You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism. And then, as if that weren’t enough, you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom."

"Where Coolidge's conservatism had led him to oppose police unions, the new right saw them as comrades. In New York City in 1965, in the midst of a quixotic run for mayor, famed National Review editor William E Buckley Jr praised the "restraint" of state troopers beating civil rights marchers an Selma, to a crowd of 5,600 cheering and clapping policemen who gave the conservative intellectual a "standing ovation." In Buckley's view, the troopers in Selma were standing for a world of "order and values," which in a certain sense was true. It was an explicitly racist order built on explicitly racist values, and the politics of policing allowed Buckley, and by extension the conservative movement, to defend that order and those values in the name of public safety rather than white supremacy."

"Buckley was conservative before conservative was cool. He was brilliant, Ivy League, handsome and very, very, VERY articulate. And he was, well, so very self confident. All of his talent and style combined to rebirth the moribund conservative movement in this country. From his founding of the National Review to the day he stepped down from moderating his signature talk show, “Firing Line.” It is fair to say that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich all owe their place in American history to the man who once famously wrote that he didn’t know anyone smarter than himself. ... In a way, it’s sad that people like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are today’s mouthpieces for conservatism. What a far leap they are from the quick witted and smart Buckley. I think it’s fair to say that even Buckley’s ideological enemies admired him and respected him. That’s because Buckley was not a hate monger; he was a serious-minded person who made reasoned and rational arguments for his cause. No apologies to Limbaugh, Savage or their listeners and adherents — they are no substitute for Buckley’s class and intellectualism."

"Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry, there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind."

"It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over."

"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."

"We need always to be thinking and writing about poverty, for if we are not among its victims, its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it."

"Now the creed to which I subscribe is like a battle cry, engraved on my heart - the Credo of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Before, in those former times, I could say, "I shall sleep in the dust: and if thou seek me in the morning, I shall not be" (Job 7:21). Now I can say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God. Whom I myself shall see and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom" (Job 19:25-27)."

"A Jewish convert said to me once, "The Communists hate God, and the Catholics love Him. But they are both facing Him, directing their attention to Him. They are not indifferent. Communists are not in so bad a case as those who are indifferent. It is the lukewarm that He will spew out of His mouth.""

"The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love."

"We stand at the present time with the Communists, who are also opposing war.... The Sermon on the Mount is our Christian manifesto."

"I had a conversation with John Spivak, the Communist writer, a few years ago, and he said to me, "How can you believe? How can you believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Virgin birth, in the Resurrection?" I could only say that I believe in the Roman Catholic Church and all she teaches. I have accepted Her authority with my whole heart. At the same time I want to point out to you that we are taught to pray for final perseverance. We are taught that faith is a gift, and sometimes I wonder why some have it and some do not. I feel my own unworthiness and can never be grateful enough to God for His gift of faith. St. Paul tells us that if we do not correspond to the graces we receive, they will be withdrawn. So I believe also that we should walk in fear, "work out our salvation in fear and trembling.""

"There is now all this patriotic indignation about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Japanese expansionism in Asia. Yet not a word about American and European expansionism in the same area.... We must make a start. We must renounce war as an instrument of policy.... Even as I speak to you I may be guilty of what some men call treason.... You young men should refuse to take up arms. Young women tear down the patriotic posters. And all of you — young and old — put away your flags."

"We are not expecting Utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter. A certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life. A family needs work as well as bread. Property is proper to man. We must keep repeating these things. Eternal life begins now. "All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said, "I am the Way." The cross is there, of course, but "in the cross is joy of spirit." And love makes all things easy."

"Of all the charges made against the Communists these days of congressional investigations, the charge of loose morals is seldom heard, so very loose have become those of "Christian" people."

"Often we comfort ourselves only with words, but if we pray enough, the conviction will come too that Christ is our King, not Stalin, Bevins, or Truman. That He has all things in His hands, that 'all things work together for good for those that love Him."

"My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with."

"I have been disillusioned, however, this long, long time in the means used by any but the saints to live in this world God has made for us."

"Marx... Lenin... Mao Tse-Tung... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions."

"But I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change."

"We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists 'of conspiring to teach [us] to do,' but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York."

"We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice."

"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"

"I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky … by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man."

"If we had had the privilege of giving hospitality to a Ho Chi Minh, with what respect and interest we would have served him, as a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders."

""What do you mean by anarchist-pacifist?" First, I would say that the two words should go together, especially … when more and more people, even priests, are turning to violence, and are finding their heroes in Camillo Torres among the priests, and Che Guevara among laymen. The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. "Greater love hath no man than this." "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Che Guevara wrote this, and he is quoted by Chicano youth in El Grito Del Norte."

"How many thousands, tens of thousands [of prisoners], are in for petty theft, while the 'robber barons' of our day get away with murder. Literally murder, accessories to murder. "Property is Theft." Proudhon wrote--The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. The early Fathers wrote--The house you don't live in, your empty buildings (novitiates, seminaries) belong to the poor. Property is Theft."

"The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up."

"What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. Going to jail for distributing leaflets advocating war tax refusal causes a ripple of thought, of conscience among us all. And of remembrance too. …. There may be ever improving standards of living in the U.S., with every worker eventually owning his own home and driving his own car; but our modern economy is based on preparation for war. … The absolutist begins a work, others take it up and try to spread it. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

"Our rule is the works of mercy… It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence."

"The great work which is to be done is to change public opinion, to indoctrinate, to set small groups to work here and there in different cities who will live a life of sacrifice, typifying the Catholic idea of personal responsibility. Numbers and organizations are not important. We are just beginning after all. But one person can do a tremendous amount of boring from within, in his office, factory, neighborhood, parish, and among his daily acquaintances and associates."

"When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me."

"When Dr. Stern wanted to know whether I was an alcoholic, when Dwight Macdonald asked me seriously whether I drank longshoremen under the table — I can only confess that yes, I did "fling roses with the throng.""

"The diocesan papers are full of stories about atrocities in China and the sufferings of the Church and I get a letter from Betty Chang from Tientsin about the communes and the full-employment, etc. When we see the migrant camps, and our factories in the fields, our system does not offer much."

"For some weeks now my problem is this: What to do about the open immorality (and of course I mean sexual morality) in our midst. It is like the last times--there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.... We have one young [prostitute], drunken, promiscuous, pretty as a picture, college educated, mischievous, able to talk her way out of any situation--so far. She comes to us when she is drunk and beaten and hungry and cold and when she is taken in, she is liable to crawl into the bed of any man on the place. We do not know how many she has slept with on the farm. What to do? What to do?"

"I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance."

"[atomic bombs are] born not that men might live, but that men might be killed."

"The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon."

"Today's paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery."

"While here in the western hemisphere, we went in for precision bombing (what chance of precision bombing now?) while we went in for obliteration bombing, Russia was very careful not to bomb cities, to wipe out civilian populations. Perhaps she was thinking of the poor, of the workers, as brothers."

"Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?" How everyone turns to the Vatican for judgment, even though they do not seem to listen to the voice there!"

"When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist."

"No force could sway her. No fear could stop her."

"Dorothy, the oldest girl, is the nut of the family. When she came out of the university she was a Communist. Now she's a Catholic crusader. She owns and runs a Catholic paper and skyhoots all over the country, delivering lectures. She has one girl in a Catholic school and is separated from her husband."

"Who is a revolutionary woman? A revolutionary woman wants change, not mere cosmetic change but change to the status quo, and she is willing to sacrifice to make this happen. We have some extraordinary examples: Sojourner Truth, Las Adelitas, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Day, Malala Yousafzai, Coretta Scott King, and others."

"Dorothy Day lived a very simple life and believed in nonviolence."

"In Floyd Dell's recollections, the Day of the Masses period was a heedless young freethinker, an adherent of the bohemian lifestyle."

"Even during her Greenwich Village years, while Day was living what she would later refer to as her "disorderly" life, she was reading Tolstoi and finding herself "thoroughly in sympathy with the Christianity he expressed, the Christianity that dispensed with a church and a priesthood.""

"While in jail for her part in the White House suffrage picketing and on hunger strike, Day began reading the Bible, and found relief in the reading from her intense physical and emotional distress. It was then, Day writes, that she began to think of her political activism in religious terms: "If we had faith in what we were doing, making our protest against brutality and injustice, then we were indeed casting our seeds, and there was promise of the harvest to come. ... I prayed and did not know that I prayed" (Long Loneliness, 78)."

"What Day brought to the Catholic Worker movement-drastically modifying it-were her political radicalism and her interest in active struggle for social justice"

"To be merely a journalistic observer of social injustice, Day considered to help in organizing work, to donate to relief funds, or even to pledge oneself to voluntary poverty for life "so that you can share with your brothers" (and Day did all of these)-was still insufficient. One must live with the needy and oppressed, "share with them their sufferings. Give up one's privacy..." (Long Loneliness, 210)."

"Even the Cuban revolution, which many anarchists regarded with mistrust for the Marxist-Leninist character it gradually assumed over the years Day regarded as a hopeful sign of awakening of popular consciousness, a victory for justice in no way incompatible with Catholic faith. "God bless the priests and people of Cuba," she wrote in 1961. "God bless Castro and all those who are seeing Christ in the poor" (By Little, 298- 302). On the other hand, she well understood the corrupting tendency toward bureaucratic centralism inherent in classic Marxism-Leninism. The rule of the Bolsheviks under Lenin, as Day pointed out, became a dictatorship of the "great mass of dispossessed industrial workers... in name only; it was to become a dictatorship by the elite few, by the members of the party" (Long Loneliness, 84). Nearer to home, she took a stand on the struggles of less radical U.S. workers' organizations. She believed that the right to strike for a better wage was more than merely compatible with Catholic faith-it was "a good impulse-one could even say an inspiration of the Holy Spirit." Strikers were, she considered, "trying to uphold their right to be treated not as slaves, but as men" (By Little, 24)."

"Most uncompromising was Day's informing vision of society's complete and utter dependency on the military-industrial complex. In a modern military state like the U.S., Day considered, there was really no such thing as a "civilian population." Everyone who participated in the economy was implicated in militaristic enterprises, if only as a consumer or a taxpayer: "... so that you are, in effect, helping to support the state's preparations for war exactly to the extent of your attachment to worldly things of whatever kind" (By Little, III). Hence, a life of voluntary poverty for Day represented not only Christian piety, but an essential strategy for diminishing each individual's complicity with the military-industrial nexus."

"Predictably, Day's views on sexuality became much more conservative after her conversion to Catholicism. As a young woman, Day had attended Emma Goldman's lectures on sexual liberation in Greenwich Village, Even at the time, the older Day claims, she was "revolted by such promiscuity" (57). In 1931, when Goldman's autobiography Living My Life was published, Day actually refused to read Goldman's account of her long series of love affairs, "because I was offended in my sex" (Long Loneliness, 17). Day clearly had no sympathy with or understanding for Goldman's conception of sexual liberation as integral to full political liberation: "Men who are revolutionaries, I thought, do not dally on the side as women do, complicating the issue by an emphasis on the personal" (57). Day later felt deeply ashamed of her only novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924), an autobiographical account of her early radical years, and actually tried to suppress the novel in the years after her conversion by buying up and destroying copies, until a priest to whom she went to confession pointed out the futility of this enterprise. While very radical in her views on communitarianism, pacifism, and the labor movement, and deeply sympathetic to the left-wing revolutionary movements around the world, Day could be conservative-even reactionary-in her treatment of those who offended her conservative sexual morality."

"Asked in a 1973 interview on public television what she thought of women's liberation, she responded by talking in the most general of terms about the importance of working for social change through "local politics.""

"Though I bequeath you no estate, I leave you in the enjoyment of liberty."

"This is the essence of the problem. To Dan Rather and to a lot of other powerful members of the chattering class, that which is right of center is conservative. That which is left of center is middle of the road. No wonder they can't recognize their own bias."

"It doesn't happen that way."

"I consider myself to be an old-fashioned liberal. I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be when they were like John F. Kennedy and when they were like Hubert Humphrey. When they were upbeat and enthusiastic and mainstream. I am not a liberal the way liberals are today at least as exemplified by Al Franken and Michael Moore, where they're angry, nasty, closed minded, & not mainstream, but fringe."

"They're responsible for the problem [of cultural meanness]."

"I admire Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly a lot because I think they're standup guys."

"The big 3 networks don't like the fact that there's a Rush Limbaugh out there, they don't like the fact that there's a Fox News, they don't like the fact that there's a Matt Drudge. They liked it when it was nice, when it was just the three of them. Well, it ain't that way anymore."

"Never in his life had Alessandro had to squint in starlight, but now the stars were so bright that at times he had to cover his eyes, and when they burned too brilliantly for keeping still, they sometimes shot across the sky in short bursts. Though these quiet illuminations vanished almost as soon as they had started, they lingered in the eye’s inexact memory of their luminescent paths. Perhaps had they been stronger and more constant, and hung in a dull white line, Alessandro’s heart would not have risen each time he saw them. They were less than little puffs of smoke, their tracks thinner than a hair, the bursts of light mainly a matter of memory."

"I remember hearing Mark Helprin being interviewed on the radio about Winter's Tale. When the interviewer referred to it as fantasy, Helprin became upset and said that he didn't think of his work in those terms, in spite of the flying horse and all the other fantastic elements. The implication was that if a work is fantasy or SF, it can't be any good."

"I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock."

"Sparkling and bright in liquid light Does the wine our goblets gleam in; With hue as red as the rosy bed Which a bee would choose to dream in. Then fill to-night, with hearts as light To loves as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim on the beaker’s brim And break on the lips while meeting."

"We can say that the United States runs the world like the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Cuba is dealt with like a woman caught outside not wearing her burkha. Horrific sanctions are imposed on Iraq in the manner of banning music, dancing, and kite-flying in Kabul. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is banished from Haiti like the religious police whipping a man whose beard is not the right length."

"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize -- very publicly and very sincerely -- to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. I would then announce that America's global interventions -- including the awful bombings -- have come to an end. And I would inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but – oddly enough – a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings and invasions. There would be more than enough money. Do you know what one year of the US military budget is equal to? One year. It's equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated."

"It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was 'to be as rich and as wise as an American'. What happened?" An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country by country, intervention by intervention. The opportunity to build the war-ravaged world anew, to lay the foundations for peace, prosperity and justice, collapsed under the awful weight of anti-communism."

"We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings (real and bogus) of the Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the history which lies behind it. The anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than the military intervention. Before the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of "Red Peril", "the Bolshevik assault on civilization", and "menace to world by Reds is seen" had become commonplace in the pages of the New York Times... Historian Frederick Lewis Schuman has written: "The net result of these hearings... was to picture Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism.""

"Literally no story about the Bolsheviks was too contrived, too bizarre, too grotesque, or too perverted to be printed and widely believed—from women being nationalized to babies being eaten (as the early pagans believed the Christians guilty of devouring their children; the same was believed of the Jews in the Middle Ages). The story about women with all the lurid connotations of state property, compulsory marriage, "free love", etc. "was broadcasted over the country through a thousand channels," wrote Schuman, "and perhaps did more than anything else to stamp the Russian Communists in the minds of most American citizens as criminal perverts". This tale continued to receive great currency even after the State Department was obliged to announce that it was a fraud. (That the Soviets eat their babies was still being taught by the John Birch Society to its large audience at least as late as 1978.)"

"This, then, was the American people's first experience of a new social phenomenon that had come upon the world, their introductory education about the Soviet Union and this thing called "communism". The students have never recovered from the lesson. Neither has the Soviet Union."

"The fiercely-held conviction inevitably produced by this insidious assault upon the intellect is that a great damnation has been unleashed upon the world, possibly by the devil himself, but in the form of people; people not motivated by the same needs, feats, emotions, and personal morality that govern others of the species, but people engaged in an extremely clever, monolithic, international conspiracy dedicated to taking over the world and enslaving it; for reasons not always clear."

"During the period between the two world wars, US gunboat diplomacy operated in the Caribbean to make "The American Lake" safe for the fortunes..."

"By the end of the Second World War, every American past the age of 40 had been subjected to some 25 years of anti-communist radiation, the average incubation period needed to produce a malignancy. Anti-communism had developed a life of its own."

"Washington policy makers and diplomats saw the world out there as one composed of "communists" and "anti-communists", whether of nations, movements or individuals. This comic-strip vision of the world, with righteous American supermen fighting communist evil everywhere, had graduated from a cynical propaganda exercise to a moral imperative of US foreign policy."

"Even the concept of "non-communist", implying some measure of neutrality, has generally been accorded scant legitimacy in this paradigm. John Foster Dulles, one of the major architects of post-war US foreign policy, expressed this succinctly in his typically simple, moralistic way: "For us there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise and there are the others." As several of the case studies in the present hook confirm, Dulles put that creed into rigid practice."

"The word "communist" (as well as "Marxist") has been so overused and so abused by American leaders and the media as to render it virtually meaningless. (The Left has done the same to the word "fascist".)"

"Much propaganda mileage has been squeezed out of the Soviet-German treaty of 1939, made possible only by entirely ignoring the fact that the Russians were forced into the pact by the repeated refusal of the Western powers, particularly the United States and Great Britain, to unite with Moscow in a stand against Hitler; as they likewise refused to come to the aid of the socialist-oriented Spanish government under siege by the German, Italian and Spanish fascists... Stalin realized that if the West wouldn't save Spain, they certainly wouldn't save the Soviet Union."

"From the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the Reagan Crusade against the Evil Empire of the 1980s, the American people have been subjected to a relentless anti-communist indoctrination. It is imbibed with their mother's milk, pictured in their comic books, spelled out in their school books; their daily paper offers them headlines that tell them all they need to know; ministers find sermons in it, politicians are elected with it, and Reader's Digest becomes rich on it."

"Moreover, any appearance or claim by these people to be rational human beings seeking a better kind of world or society is a sham, a cover-up, to delude others, and proof only of their cleverness; the repression and cruelties which have taken place in the Soviet Union are forever proof of the bankruptcy of virtue and the evil intentions of these people in whichever country they may be found, under whatever name they may call themselves: and, most important of all, the only choice open to anyone in the United States is between the American Way of Life and the Soviet Way of Life, that nothing lies between or beyond these two ways of making the world."

"To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States, the truths of anticommunism are self-evident, as self-evident as the flatness of the world once was to an earlier mind..."

"The foregoing slice of American history must be taken into account if one is to make sense of the vagaries of American foreign policy since the end of World War II, specifically the record, as presented in this book, of what the US military and the CIA and other branches of the US government have done to the peoples of the world."

"How is it that the Korean War escaped the protests which surrounded the war in Vietnam? Everything we've come to love and cherish about Vietnam had its forerunner in Korea: the support of a corrupt tyranny, the atrocities, the napalm, the mass slaughter of civilians, the cities and villages laid to waste, the calculated management of the news, the sabotaging of peace talks. But the American people were convinced that the war in Korea was an unambiguous case of one country invading another without provocation. A case of the bad guys attacking the good guys who were being saved by the even better guys..."

"Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out.. Variations of the water torture were also used to loosen tongues or simply to torment... Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk, involve cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner."

"During the Vietnam war, a number of young Americans refused military service on the grounds that the United States was committing war crimes in Vietnam and that if they took part in the war they too, under the principles laid down at Nuremberg, would be guilty of war crimes. One of the most prominent of these cases was that of David Mitchell of Connecticut. At Mitchell's trial in September 1965, Judge William Timbers dismissed his defense as "tommyrot" and "degenerate subversion", and found the Nuremberg principles to be "irrelevant" to the case. Mitchell was sentenced to prison."

"In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg, suggested rather strongly that General William Westmoreland and high officials of the Johnson administration such as Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk could be found guilty of war crimes under criteria established at Nuremberg. Yet every American court and judge, when confronted by the Nuremberg defense, dismissed it without according it any serious consideration whatsoever."

"The West has never been allowed to forget the Nazi holocaust. For 55 years there has been a continuous outpouring of histories, memoirs, novels, feature films, documentaries, television series ... played and replayed in every Western language; there have been museums, memorial sculptures, photo exhibitions, remembrance ceremonies ... Never Again! But who hears the voice of the Vietnamese peasant? Who has access to the writings of the Vietnamese intellectual? What was the fate of the Vietnamese Anne Frank? Where, asks the young American, is Vietnam?"

"Throughout the 1960s, the Caribbean island was subjected to countless sea and air commando raids by exiles, at times accompanied by their CIA supervisors, inflicting damage upon oil refineries, chemical plants and railroad bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and sugar warehouses; infiltrating spies, saboteurs and assassins ... anything to damage the Cuban economy, promote disaffection, or make the revolution look bad ... taking the lives of Cuban militia members and others in the process ... pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships, bombardments of Soviet vessels docked in Cuba, an assault upon a Soviet army camp with 12 Russian soldiers reported wounded... a hotel and a theatre shelled from offshore because Russians and East Europeans were supposed to be present there."

"These actions were not always carried out on the direct order of the CIA or with its foreknowledge, but the Agency could hardly plead "rogue elephant". It had created an operations headquarters in Miami that was truly a state within a city—over, above, and outside the laws of the United States, not to mention international law, with a staff of several hundred Americans directing many more Cuban agents in just such types of actions, with a budget in excess of $50 million a year, and an arrangement with the local press to keep operations in Florida secret except when the CIA wanted something publicized."

"Title 18 of the US Code declares it to be a crime to launch a "military or naval expedition or enterprise" from the United States against a country with which the United States is not (officially) at war."

"The commando raids were combined with a total US trade and credit embargo, which continues to this day, and which genuinely hurt the Cuban economy and chipped away at the society's standard of living."

"Moreover, pressure was brought to bear upon other countries to conform to the embargo, and goods destined for Cuba were sabotaged: machinery damaged, chemicals added to lubricating fluids to cause rapid wear on diesel engines, a manufacturer in West Germany paid to produce ball-bearings off-center, another to do the same with balanced wheel gears—"You're talking about big money," said a CIA officer involved in the sabotage efforts, "when you ask a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to reset his whole mold. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or more.""

"What undoubtedly was an even more sensitive venture was the use of chemical and biological weapons against Cuba by the United States....The full extent of American chemical and biological warfare against Cuba will never be known. Over the years, the Castro government has in fact blamed the United States for a number of other plagues which afflicted various animals and crops. And in 1977, newly-released CIA documents disclosed that the Agency "maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries...""

"Cuba had become what Washington had always feared from the Third World—a good example. Parallel to the military and economic belligerence, the United States has long maintained a relentless propaganda offensive against Cuba. A number of examples of this occurring in other countries can be found in other chapters of this book. In addition to its vast overseas journalistic empire, the CIA has maintained anti-Castro news-article factories in the United States for decades."

"Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume—a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power—an elected Marxist in power."

"For more than 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that .. it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over who your leaders will be, and we'll protect you.""

"Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the U.S. caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."

"There have also been cases where the United States, while (perhaps) not interfering in the election process, was, however, involved in overthrowing a democratically-elected government, such as in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, the Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964, Greece 1967, and Fiji 1987."

"I was quite surprised and even shocked and amused when I found out what he'd said [...] I was glad. I knew it would help the book's sales and I was not bothered by who it was coming from. If he shares with me a deep dislike for the certain aspects of US foreign policy, then I'm not going to spurn any endorsement of the book by him. I think it's good that he shares those views and I'm not turned off by that."

"The world has lost an antiwar legend. The renowned historian and journalist William Blum died on December 9 at the age of 85. He was a lifelong anti-imperialist committed to exposing U.S. war crimes and CIA covert activities across the globe. Blum was the author of several influential books, including Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, and Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Most outrageously, The New York Times published an obituary with the title William Blum: U.S. Policy Critic Cited By Bin Laden Dies at 85. So we have the U.S. newspaper of record reducing the entire decades-long career of this renowned historian who reported on U.S. war crimes, reducing him simply to someone who was once cited by Osama bin Laden, as if that summarizes his whole legacy."

"There are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government's policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum, and Anthony Arnove to tell us what's really going on."

"Most importantly, he wrote amazing, two amazing books that I know of. Rogue Nation which was 2000, I believe (when it) came out... A listing of all crimes of the CIA. Amazing story, amazing amount of detail and research. Very specific. He followed that up with Killing Hope, where he repeated many of these themes, and he added information from that period; it came out in 2003. Both books really belong in universities, to be studied by major universities. Everybody across the board, even high schools. This is important stuff, and it’s been ignored. This is, I would call it, a dissident historian, if you’d like... He was a true dissident, because he called things as it was....Very important that we continue this sort of...tradition... of telling the truth."

"Anybody trying to do anything worthwhile in Russia at the moment is moving toward the left. [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky is correct, although all the democrats condemned his thoughts from prison. Russia's Left March is a fait accompli, which also rules out any Russian Orange Revolution. There will be no splendid revolutionary breakthrough with oranges, tulips, or roses in Russia. Our revolution, if it comes, will be red, because the Communists are almost the most democratic force in the country, and because it will be bloody."

"[It] is we who are responsible for Putin's policies ... [s]ociety has shown limitless apathy ... [a]s the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that."

"My heroes are those people who want to be individuals but are being forced to be cogs again. In an Empire there are only cogs."

"Tragically, our most active democrats are on the Left. I cannot bring myself to vote Communist because the distance between their progressive and repressive instincts is too short, but Putin's regime is a great recruiting ground for the Left, particularly among the young."

"We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."

"We have no philanthropists and [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky's imprisonment is a warning to others. He set up the Open Russia Foundation and financed opposition parties, environmental organisations and human rights. Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will not allow foreigners to finance our civil society, but now we have no domestic investors to do it, which is a tragedy. If we continue like this, 100 years from now there will be no civil society in Russia."

"The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous."

"We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again."

"Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start."

"Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions."

"Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims."

"The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free – which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state."

"White House adviser Kellyanne Conway: “Three magic words, ‘Believe All Women.’ I didn’t hear an asterisk; I didn’t see a footnote, ‘Believe All Women so long as they are attacking somebody aligned with President Trump, Believe All Women so long as they are — have a college degree or better or are — are for abortion in the ninth month.’” In fact, “Believe All Women” does have an asterisk: *It’s never been feminist “boilerplate.” What we are witnessing is another instance of the right decrying what it imagines the American women’s movement to be. Spend some mind-numbing hours tracking the origins of “Believe All Women” on social media sites and news databases — as I did — and you’ll discover how language, like a virus, can mutate overnight. All of a sudden, yesterday’s quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize. In this case, that foreign intrusion is a word: “all.”"

"The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic. Not all of the manifestations of the backlash are of equal weight or significance, either; some are mere ephemera, generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a “fresh” angle. Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their “acceptable” roles — whether as Daddy's girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object."

"Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see — and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too — on herself."

"In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep “concern”. Its lips profess pity for any woman who won't fit the mold, while it tries to clamp the mold around her ears. It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle- versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don't. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground."

"Backlash happens to be the title of a 1947 Hollywood movie in which a man frames his wife for a murder he's committed. The backlash against women's rights works in much the same way: its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it perpetrates. The backlash line blames the women's movement for the “feminization of poverty” ñwhile the backlash's own instigators in Washington pushed through the budget cuts that helped impoverish millions of women, fought pay equity proposals, and undermined equal opportunity laws. The backlash line claims the women's movement cares nothing for children's rightsñwhile its own represetatives in the capital and state legislatures have blocked one bill after another to improve child care, slashed billions of dollars in federal aid for children, and relaxed state licensing standards for day care centers. The backlash line accuses the women's movement of creating a generation of unhappy single and childless womenñbut its purveyors in the media are the ones guilty of making single and childless women feel like circus freaks."

"To blame feminism for women's “lesser life” is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated — and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: l only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.""

"The meaning of the word “feminist” has not really changed since it first appeared in a book review in the Athenaeum of April 27, 1895, describing a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.” It is the basic proposition that, as Nora put it in Ibsen's A Doll's House a century ago, “Before everything else I'm a human being.” It is the simply worded sign hoisted by a little girl in the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL. Feminism asks the world to recognize at long last that women aren't decorative ornaments, worthy vessels, members of a “special-interest group”. They are half (in fact, now more than half) of the national population, and just as deserving of rights and opportunities, just as capable of participating in the world's events, as the other half. Feminism's agenda is basic It asks that women not be forced to “choose” between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves — instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men."

"Feminist author Susan Faludi argues in the New York Times that feminists never said believe all women—you only have to believe some women. It is Ms. Faludi’s contention that "unprincipled" conservatives inserted the "all," and hung it around the necks of unsuspecting feminists. Ms. Faludi has spent mind-numbing hours in Harvard Schlesinger Library tracking this idea. Why did she embark on this tedious task? Two words: Tara Reade."

"What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive — and has never put in an honest day's work in its life."

"Elvis' quest led him through the study of all religions from Judaism to Buddhism and the teachings of theosophy with its belief in pantheistic evolution, reincarnation, the mystic the psychic, the spiritual, and the occult — in short, all the Aladdin lamps that lit up the 1960s. But before we roll about with laughter at the spectacle of this young many from the Bible Belt, raised on fundamentalism and comics, though apparently already well versed in polypharmacy — struggling to master the Wisdom of the East, we might pause a moment to note the names of George Bernard Shaw, Louis Lumière, Thomas Edison, Yeats, Havelock Ellis, Maeterlinck, the educator Rudolf Steiner, Krishnamurti, and Gandhi, all of whom had been influenced by or involved in theosophy at one time or another and would, not doubt, have welcomed Elvis with open arms as a fellow traveler in the belief that magic is inherent in us all."

"I'd always prided myself on how unlike my books were from each other in settings and subject matter. But not until late in my career did I realize that a single thread ran through them, that I'd used the same strategy to catch the reader's attention. It is the old Western movie gimmick: A Stranger Comes to Town. I am that Stranger. Together with the reader I will discover what's going on in that town whether it be Paris, London, New York, Sydney, Tupelo, Ferriday — or in a women's federal prison. And eventually we will make sense of it."

"Being with Hemingway meant joining in his elaborate game playing as a necessary mark of respect. Tennessee asked only that you be colorful and that you be honest. Looking back I still find the 50s the most exhilarating decade I've lived through. The only mistake I made then was in thinking it would go on forever. I keep reading it was all Dull Conformity and I wonder where those people were living. Not on my planet. The fact that we had won World War 2 and that we were alive led to a post-war cultural explosion."

"At some point in my life I realized I knew only celebrities, I didn't know any real people. I think it was a master stroke of Fate that in researching the greatest celebrity of them all, I would at last be meeting real people, finding them more extraordinary than celebrities; fascinated by them all and enjoying enduring friendships with some."

"I didn't know Elvis was alive until he was dead. But how many stories are like mine? Until his death August 16, 1977, it was possible to get through a day without hearing his name. Of course I remember all the early outrage he caused but believe me it was easy not to see any of his films. It doesn't mean that music has not always dominated my heart and mind. During the years barren of Elvis I did have my record player on constantly but it was playing folk, blues, and jazz. It was playing Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Billie Holiday, Ethel Merman, and Noel Coward. The human voice raised in song has always been important to me so I include Miles Davis whose trumpet is such an important human voice. Then after his death in London in taxis, on radio and TV I heard nothing but Elvis records and that grabbed my attention."

"Sitting in the impressive high-ceilinged hall, an examiner had just given me the test on my eyes, which I failed again. She was talking to me but I was distracted by a blind man with dark glasses walking at some distance from me, his white cane clattering, echoing as it tap tapped away on the floor. What the examiner was repeating — and these are her exact words — was: "There is no cause and no cure for AMD yet." The dam burst. I began to cry, tears running down my face, sudden, unstoppable, embarrassing. In the restroom, I collapsed. My arms were shaking, my fingers stiffened, froze, and then tingled. My stomach was in an uproar. And I kept crying, knowing that I would never go back to seeing what I used to see. I felt hopeless, defenceless; worst of all, I felt timid. I was crying for my dead self. Up to now I'd been congratulating myself for bearing up so well. Now I realised this was because the ophthalmologists always referred to AMD as a disease. For me it meant there would be a cure. Now I knew there would be no new glasses, no medication, no surgery."

"Ken, the Tot of Destiny, had turned into the Marquis de Sade, and I in response had become a virago."

"It was a hot, peaceful, optimistic sort of day in September. It was around eleven in the morning, I remember, and I was drifting down the boulevard St. Michel, thoughts rising in my head like little puffs of smoke, when suddenly a voice bellowed into my ear: "Sally Jay Gorce! What the hell? Well, for Christ’s sake, can this really be our own little Sally Jay Gorce?” I felt a hand ruffling my hair and I swung around, furious at being so rudely awakened. Who should be standing there in front of me, in what I immediately spotted as the Left Bank uniform of the day, dark wool shirt and a pair of old Army suntans, but my old friend Larry Keevil. He was staring down at me with some alarm. I said hello to him and added that he had frightened me, to cover any bad-tempered expression that might have been lingering on my face, but he just kept on staring dumbly at me. "What have you been up to since … since … when the hell was it that I last saw you?” he asked finally. Curiously enough I remembered exactly."

"I’d made a vow when I got over here never to speak to anyone I’d ever known before. Yet here we were, two Americans who hadn’t really seen each other for years; here was someone from "home” who knew me when, if you like, and, instead of shambling back into the bushes like a startled rhino, I was absolutely thrilled at the whole idea. "I like it here, don’t you?” said Larry, indicating the café with a turn of his head. I had to admit I’d never been there before. He smiled quizzically. "You should come more often,” he said. "It’s practically the only nontourist trap to survive on the Left Bank. It’s real” he added. Real, I thought … whatever that meant."

"I suppose Larry’s "reality” in this case was based on the café’s internationality. But perhaps all cafés near a leading university have that authentic international atmosphere. At the table closest to us sat an ordinary-looking young girl with lank yellow hair and a gray-haired bespectacled middle-aged man. They had been conversing fiercely but quietly for some time now in a language I was not even able to identify. All at once I knew that I liked this place, too. Jammed in on all sides, with the goodish Tower of Babel working itself up to a frenzy around me, I felt safe and anonymous and, most of all, thankful we were going to be spared those devastating and shattering revelations one was always being treated to at the more English-speaking cafés like the Flore. And, as I said, I was very glad to have run into Larry."

"Slowly his eyes left my hair and traveled downwards. This time he really took in my outfit and then that Look that I’m always encountering; that special one composed in equal parts of amusement, astonishment and horror came over his face. I am not a moron and I can generally guess what causes this look. The trouble is, it’s always something different. I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling his eyes bearing down on my bare shoulders and breasts. "What the hell are you doing in the middle of the morning with an evening dress on?” he asked me finally. "Sorry about that,” I said quickly, "but it’s all I’ve got to wear. My laundry hasn’t come back yet.”"

"Maybe because I had been out very late the night before and was not able to put up my usual resistance, but it seemed to me, sitting there with the sound of his voice dying in my ears, that I could fall in love with him. And then, as unexpected as a hidden step, I felt myself actually stumble and fall. And there it was, I was in love with him! As simple as that. He was the first real person I’d ever been in love with. I couldn’t get over it. What I was trying to figure out was why I had never been in love with him before. I mean I’d had plenty of chance to. I’d seen him almost daily that summer in Maine two years ago when we were both in a Summer Stock company. … He was always rather nice to me in his insolent way, but there was also, I now remembered with a passing pang, an utterly ravishing girl, a model, the absolute epitome of glamour, called Lila. She used to come up at week ends to see him. Then I heard from someone that he’d quit college the next winter and gone abroad to become a genius. I’d met him again when I first landed in Paris. He’d been very nice, bought me a drink, taken down my telephone number and never called me. You’re a dead duck now, I told myself, as I relaxed back into my coma. You’re gone. I looked at him, smiling idly. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind."

"He put his hand over mine, the one with the dead cigarette crumbled in it, and gave me a wonderful smile. "Easy, child, easy. I’m only teasing you. Don’t think I disapprove for Christ’s sake. Live it up, I say. Don’t say no to life, Gorce, you’re only young once.” We were on last name terms, Keevil and I."

"My thoughts were chasing each other all over the place, but nothing seemed to sort itself out. Advice, I thought. Ask his advice. On love? Finance? Career? Better stick to love, I decided, it’s what’s on your mind anyway. And with that my mind went blank."

"The sun shone on: the shade of the awning vanished in the hot, white, shadowless midday. In that blaze of heat I was loving Paris as never before. And there sitting opposite me, stretching himself luxuriously in the sun, his eyes lazily examining his half-empty drink, was Larry, the one I loved the best … sensationally uninterested."

"I stumbled across the Champs Élysées . I know it seems crazy to say, but before I actually stepped onto it (at what turned out to be the Étoile ) I had not even been aware of its existence. No, I swear it. I’d heard the words "Champs Élysées," of course, but I thought it was a park or something. I mean that’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it? All at once I found myself standing there gazing down that enchanted boulevard in the blue, blue evening. Everything seemed to fall into place. Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it. I began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground, as easily as a Cocteau character floats through Hell. Luxury and order seemed to be shining from every street lamp along the Avenue; shining from every window of its toyshops and dress-shops and carshops; shining from its cafés and cinemas and theaters; from its bonbonneries and parfumeries and nighteries.… Talk about seeing Eternity in a Grain of Sand and Heaven in a Wild Flower; I really think I was having some sort of mystic revelation then. The whole thing seemed like a memory from the womb. It seemed to have been waiting there for me. For some people history is a Beach or a Tower or a Graveyard. For me it was this giant primordial Toyshop with all its windows gloriously ablaze. It contained everything I’ve ever wanted that money can buy. It was an enormous Christmas present wrapped in silver and blue tissue paper tied with satin ribbons and bells. Inside would be something to adorn, to amuse, and to dazzle me forever. It was my present for being alive."

"Judy lived in my hotel. She was just seventeen, and what she was doing in Paris was supposedly chaperoning her younger brother, a fully fledged concert pianist of fifteen, who was studying there with one of the leading teachers. In view of their combined and startling innocence, however, this was a rather useless arrangement. Their last name was Galache, and they were the issue with which the highly unlikely union of a Quaker woman from Philadelphia and a dreadfully dashing Spaniard (now, alas, dead) had been blessed. Naturally their upbringing, up to this point, had been strict and very sheltered. … Judy was so different from me that it was really ludicrous. Whereas I was hell-bent for living, she was content, at least for the time being, to leave all that to others. Just as long as she could hear all about it. She really was funny about this. Folded every which way on the floor, looking like Bambi — all eyes and legs and no chin — she would listen for ages and ages with rapt attention to absolutely any drivel that you happened to be talking. It was unbelievable."

"Ridiculous as the idea may have been for her bluestocking mother to send brother and sister over alone like this, the fact was that Judy was protected as much by her curiosity as by her innocence. And then there was this other thing about her, too. You know all that razzle-dazzle about people being born in Original Sin and all that rot? Well, maybe it’s rot and maybe it isn’t. I mean I wouldn’t slit my throat from ear to ear, just because I’d found out for sure that most people are. But she wasn’t. That was the thing. She simply wasn’t. I’m positive of that."

"There are, I know (it was in our philosophy course in college), at least a hundred different reasons why some particular event takes place. So I thrashed about again trying to find some other truth and in the instant that it flashed through my head, I think I got as close to my raison d’etre as I ever have."

"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."

"I look back in wonder at The Dud Avocado: in wonder at its initial reception and at the many times it’s been reissued — for years it was even republished alongside of every new book of mine that came out. I look back in wonder at the 1950s. The dull conformity of those years as they are generally imagined is something I don’t recognize. I look back in wonder at London in particular, where whole areas destroyed during the Second World War still lay in rubble. But London was in the midst of a renaissance for artists. In literature and playwriting the Angry Young Men were making their splash and new young actors like Richard Burton, Peter O Toole, Albert Finney, and Peter Finch were coming into their own. London was an orderly place where it was safe to take risks. Optimism was the rule of the day and I was there."

"In London, aside from bit parts, I was unlucky in my career but I was lucky in love. There was a theatrical club much frequented by all the young lions on their way up. They all gathered to eat inexpensively and be made blissful by the lethal house cider. It was there I met Ken Tynan, recently down from Oxford, and already the enfant terrible of Britain’s drama critics. Mutually magnetized, we married three months later. I sent a wire to my parents in New York: "Have married Englishman. Letter follows." I was madly in love with him and stepped happily into the Wonderland of his fame."

"Halfway through writing the book, I still had no title. It came wonderfully into being when I complimented my host at a party on his flourishing avocado plant. I said, I’d kept trying and failing with my own avocado pits. Someone said, what you’ve got is a dud avocado, and Ken said, that’s a good title for a novel. I thought, this title is mine, and it was. Ken and I had the same agent, and for a publisher we decided on Victor Gollancz, who was so good with first novels. Wonderfully, he accepted it, but with several caveats. He didn’t like the title. It sounded like a cookbook. He also wanted me to write under my married name. I said no to both. He accepted. He decided it needed a subtitle, "La Vie Amoureuse of Sally Jay in Paris." I said, Oh no, no! He said, this was the first time in his experience that an unknown writer had complained about a book cover. However, he did put on the book’s jacket that the subtitle was the publisher’s. Ken read it in proof and said, "You’ve got a thumping great best-seller here." Curiously, the first thing I felt was relief. I believed him. No one could predict how a play or novel would be received by the public like Ken could. And only then was I set free to let excitement take hold of me."

"The reviews were excellent and the book quickly went into a second printing. Then one night Ken came home and threw a copy of the book out the window. "You weren’t a writer when I married you, you were an actress," he said angrily. Obviously his colleagues had been riding him because of the attention I was receiving. I was shattered. The next day, he said, "I’ve been rereading your book. There’s love on every page." And then he gave me a beautiful red leather-bound copy of it with the inscription: "From the Critic to the Author." Looking at it I felt a pang. I wondered if it was his admission of what I’d done that he had not. To my wonder and, it appeared, his annoyance, the book wouldn’t go away."

"The Big Personalities weighed in. Soon after its publication Irwin Shaw wrote to me praising it. Terry Southern, calling me "Miss Smarts," said I was "a perfect darling." Gore Vidal phoned one morning saying, "You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go." Ernest Hemingway said to me, "I liked your book. I liked the way your characters all speak differently." And then added, "My characters all sound the same because I never listen." All this, and heaven too. Laurence Olivier told me that now that my book was making a lot of money we could elope and I could support us. The Financial Times ran an item which read, "Such and such stock: No dud avocado." Groucho Marx wrote me, "I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado.… If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it." When people ask me how autobiographical the book is I say, all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up."

"My success took another road. I complained to Rod Steiger, "The book’s hardly been out and everyone wants to know what I’m going to write next. I mean, don’t I get to rest on my laurels?" In fact I had no idea of writing a second novel. "No," said Rod, answering my question. "Succeeding only means you get another chance to try to do it again." I thought about it, and then Ken said to me, "If you write another book, I’ll divorce you." I sat down and started my second novel and wondered that I knew its beginning and its end. I put it aside to write a play which went on in London.… I went back to my novel and finished it. It was published to good reviews but now there were a couple of stinkers. I tore them up and flushed them down the toilet. I’d become a writer. In 1964 Ken and I got divorced. Well, we did bad things to each other. Now, some three decades later, I look back in gratitude at him: I look back in wonder."

"I don't make the habit of writing to married women, especially if the husband is a dramatic critic, but I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you're the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which incidentally is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don't know how on earth you got through it."

"It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them … it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon … but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech. The Dud Avocado is further handicapped by being funny. Americans like comedy but don’t trust it, a fact proved each year when the Oscars are handed out: our national motto seems to be Lord Byron’s "Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter/Sermons and soda-water the day after." To be sure, The Dud Avocado is perfectly serious, but it preaches no sermons, and what it has to say about life must be read between the punch lines. That was what kept Powell under wraps for so long — nobody thought that a writer so amusing could really be any good, especially if she was also a woman — and it has been working against Elaine Dundy ever since she published The Dud Avocado, her first novel, in 1958."

"Her life among the lions on both sides of the Atlantic is not only witty but wise as she brings into focus one husband Kenneth Tynan, one Orson Welles, the one and only Elvis Presley, and not least of all, the lioness herself, surviving all."

"What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price."

"Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-tuning originality."

"Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict."

"It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. ...Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. ...There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them."

"Chaotic theory is mathematically based on non-linear propositions, "meaning that they expressed relationships that were not strictly proportional. Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph""

"Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph. Linear relationships are easy to think about....Linear equations are solvable... Linear systems have an important modular virtue: you can take them apart, and put them together again — the pieces add up."

"In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor."

"Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines"

"The national religion in the United States is worship of all things military. And journalists are its high priests."

"Many of the benefits from keeping Terrorism fear levels high are obvious. Private corporations suck up massive amounts of Homeland Security cash as long as that fear persists, while government officials in the National Security and Surveillance State can claim unlimited powers, and operate with unlimited secrecy and no accountability. In sum, the private and public entities that shape government policy and drive political discourse profit far too much in numerous ways to allow rational considerations of the Terror threat."

"There's a very similar and at least equally important (though far less discussed) constituency deeply vested in the perpetuation of this fear. It's the sham industry... "terrorism experts," who have built their careers on fear-mongering... and can stay relevant only if that threat does. These "terrorism experts" form an incredibly incestuous, mutually admiring little clique in and around Washington. They're employed at think tanks, academic institutions, and media outlets. They can and do have mildly different political ideologies -- some are more Republican, some are more Democratic -- but, as usual for D.C. cliques, ostensible differences in political views are totally inconsequential when placed next to their common group identity and career interest: namely, sustaining the myth of the Grave Threat... in order to justify their fear-based careers, the relevance of their circle, and their alleged "expertise." Like all adolescent, insular cliques, they defend one another reflexively whenever a fellow member is attacked, closing ranks with astonishing speed and loyalty; they take substantive criticisms very personally as attacks on their "friends," because a criticism of the genre and any member in good standing of this fiefdom is a threat..."

"There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than "Terrorism." It shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have to get information from the Terrorists); due-process-free-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists); and rampant secrecy (the Government can't disclose what it's doing or have courts rule on its legality because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism)."

"Nothing is more vital than enabling true transparency and adversarial journalism, and preventing further assaults on them."

"Several weeks ago, I wrote about the steps taken by the US government to pressure large corporations to choke off the finances and other means of support for WikiLeaks in retaliation for the group's exposure of substantial government deceit, wrongdoing and illegality. Because WikiLeaks has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, I wrote: "that the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode.""

"I disclosed that I had been involved in discussions "regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments."... Its name is Freedom of the Press Foundation...The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. Government pressure and the eager compliance of large financial corporations (such as Visa, Master Card, Bank of America, etc.) has - by design - made it extremely difficult for anyone to donate to WikiLeaks, while many people are simply afraid to directly support the group (for reasons I explained here)."

"The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday's pieties are actually shameful errors."

"The NSA and GCHQ … are obsessed with searching out any small little crevice on the planet where some forms of communication may be taking place without them being able to invade it. … They are obsessed with finding ways to invade the systems of online, onboard internet services and mobile phone services, because the very idea that human beings can communicate even for a few moments without them being able to collect and store and analyze and monitor what it is that we're saying is simply intolerable."

"The corporate press’ “myths” include “that Edward Snowden is a Russian spy... While he was in Hong Kong . . . what was being said with the same authoritative tone: ‘It’s very obvious: Edward Snowden is a Chinese spy.’ When he ended up being trapped in Moscow, the very same people who’d said that, their accusations instantly morphed into, ‘Of course, he’s a Russian spy,' without any acknowledgement they’d been saying something profoundly different just weeks earlier." ...This character assassination includes the allegation that Snowden’s motive for leaking NSA classified information is due to his being “a narcissist” — although after initially coming forward Snowden turned down numerous interview requests from top media outlets, which, Greenwald quipped, is a strange way for someone craving attention to behave... He also defended Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, whom he said had been smeared in the press for blowing the whistle... Maligning dissidents as deviant or mentally ill is a technique repressive regimes use to marginalize dissenters, Greenwald said, the rationale being that only crazy people would resist the status quo, while normal, well-adjusted people support it. He added that those reporters who are professional flatterers of the powers-that-be can’t understand someone acting and taking risks due to “conscience” because they are cowards minus consciences."

"No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. [...] A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one."

"Over the pasty decades, the fear of terrorism—stoked by consistent exaggerations of the actual threat—has been exploited by US leaders to justify a weird array of extremist policies."

"To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination."

"Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote."

"But when it became clear that Obama was not just continuing, but in many cases expanding these abuses", he said. "I realized then that I couldn't wait for a leader to fix these things. Leadership is about acting first and serving as an example for others, not waiting for others to act."

"[The first article about NSA surveillance] "It's everywhere," Snowden said, clearly excited. "I watched all your interviews. Everyone seemed to get it.""

"History leaves no doubt that collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance."

"Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the [United States] government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda."

"Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe."

"Thus, for all the government's denials, the NSA has no substantial constraints on whom it can spy and how. [...] The NSA is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability."

"More remarkable is the fact that in country after country, revelations that the NSA was spying on hundreds of millions of their citizens produced little more than muted objections from their political leadership. True indignation came gushing forward only once those leaders understood that they, and not just their citizens, had been targeted as well."

"But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers [by Huawei], foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones."

"Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and AT&T employ hordes of former top government officials, while hordes of current top defense officials are past (and likely future) employees of those same corporations. Constantly growing the surveillance state is a way to ensure that the government funds keep flowing, that the revolving door stays greased."

"Mass surveillance by the state is therefore inherently repressive, even in the unlikely case that it is not abused. [...] In Discipline and Punish, Foucault further explained that ubiquitous surveillance not only empowers authorities and compel compliance but also induces individuals to internalize their watchers. [...] Merely organizing movements of dissent becomes difficult when the government is watching everything people are doing."

"An essential deceit: that dissent from institutional authority involves a moral or ideological choice, while obedience does not. With that false premise in place, society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions. [...] The only leaks that Washington media condemns are those that contain information officials would prefer to hide."

"Nobody needed the US Constitution to guarantee press freedom so that journalists could befriend, amplify and glorify political leaders; the guarantee was necessary so that journalists could do the opposite."

"Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith hailed what he called "an underappreciated phenomenon: the patriotism of the American press". [...] The revolvind door moves the media figures into high-level Washington jobs, jut as government officials often leave office to the reward of a lucrative media contract."

"Today, for many in the profession, praise from the government for "responsible" reporting—for taking its direction about what should and should not be published—is a badge of honor. That this is the case is the true measure of how far adversarial journalism in the United States has fallen."

"What is lost when the private realm is abolished are many of the attributes typically associated with quality of life. Most people have experienced how privacy enables liberation from constraint. And we’ve all, conversely, had the experience of engaging in private behavior when we thought we were alone – dancing, confessing, exploring sexual expression, sharing untested ideas – only to feel shame at having been seen by others."

"Forgoing privacy in a quest for absolute safety is as harmful to a healthy psyche and life of an individual as it is to a healthy political culture. For the individual, safety first means a life of paralysis and fear, never entering a car or airplane, never engaging in an activity that entails risk, never weighing quality of life over quantity, and paying any price to avoid danger. [...] A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up its liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security. However, absolute safety is itself chimeric, pursued but never obtained. The pursuit degrades those who engage in it as well as any nation that comes to be defined by it."

"Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name. [...] Conversely, the presumption is that the government, with rare exceptions, will not know anything that law-abiding citizens are doing. [...] Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else."

"Even the most committed activists are often tempted to succumb to defeatism The prevailing institutions seem too powerful to challenge; orthodoxies feel to entrenched to uproot; there are always many parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret, who can decide what kind of world we want to live in. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistleblowing, of activism, of political [[journalism]. And that's what is happening now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden."

"Those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully."

"Imposing or propping up dictators subservient to the U.S. has long been, and continues to be, the preferred means for U.S. policymakers to ensure that those inconvenient popular beliefs are suppressed. None of this is remotely controversial or even debatable. U.S. support for tyrants has largely been conducted out in the open, and has been expressly defended and affirmed for decades by the most mainstream and influential U.S. policy experts and media outlets."

"The foreign policy guru most beloved and respected in Washington, Henry Kissinger, built his career on embracing and propping up the most savage tyrants because of their obeisance to U.S. objectives. Among the statesman’s highlights, as documented, he "pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan"; "began the U.S.’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran"; and "supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America." Kissinger congratulated for its and carried out by one of the 20th century’s worst monsters, the Indonesian dictator and close U.S. ally ."

"In sum, the post-World War II — independent of its massive human rights violations committed over and over around the world — has been predicated on and, even more so, . This policy has been applied all over the world, on multiple continents and by every administration. It is impossible to understand even the most basic aspects of the U.S. role in the world without knowing that."

"One of the odd aspects of animal mistreatment in the U.S. is that species regarded as more intelligent and emotionally complex — dogs, dolphins, cats, primates — generally receive more public concern and more legal protection. Yet pigs – among the planet’s most intelligent, social, and emotionally complicated species, capable of great joy, play, love, connection, suffering and pain, at least on a par with dogs — receive almost no protections, and are subject to savage systematic abuse by U.S. factory farms."

"In sum, with industry insiders dominating the sole agency (USDA) with the authority to regulate factory farms, animals that are captive, abused, tortured, and slaughtered en masse have little chance, even when it comes to just applying existing laws with a minimal amount of diligence. The politics of the U.S. — including the fact that a key farm state, Iowa, plays such a central role in presidential elections — means there are massive forces arrayed behind factory farms, and very few in support of animal welfare."

"In general, the core moral and philosophical question at the heart of animal rights activism is now being seriously debated: Namely, what gives humans the right or justification to abuse, exploit, and torture non-human species? If there comes a day when some other species (broadly defined) — such as machines — surpass humans in intellect and cognitive complexity, will they have a valid moral claim to treat humans as commodities whose suffering and death can be assigned no value? The irreconcilable contradiction of lavishing love and protection on dogs and cats, while torturing and slaughtering farm animals capable of a deep emotional life and great suffering, is becoming increasingly apparent."

"There is a temptation to turn away from and ignore this mass suffering and cruelty because it’s so painful to confront, so much more pleasant to remain unaware of it. Animal rights activists are determined to prevent us from doing so, and we should all feel gratitude for their increasing success in making us see what we are enabling when we consume the products of this barbaric and sociopathic industry."

"Don't even try that pathetic tactic. Huge numbers of people are disgusted by what you're doing. She's a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors & half-Mexican. And maybe as a gay Jew, I also have a personal stake in who is and isn't an actual Nazi. You don't own this discourse."

"Last week, the New York Times reported that the FBI, in 2017, launched an investigation of President Trump “to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security” and specifically “whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” ...As usual – this melodrama was accomplished by steadfastly ignoring the now-standard, always-buried paragraph pointing out the boring fact that no actual evidence of guilt has yet emerged."

"The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump is far from the first time that the FBI has monitored, surveilled and investigated U.S. elected officials.... It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures whose loyalties they regard as “suspicious,” and whose political career they regard as a “national security threat,” simply because those politicians express policy positions about U.S. adversaries that the FBI dislikes... If a politician adopts policy views... which is unduly accommodating to America’s adversaries or “enemies,” that’s not a crime and the FBI thus has no business using its vast investigative powers against...[them]"

"Obviously, if there is reason to suspect that actual crimes have been committed... then it’s not just permissible but vital that the FBI investigate such allegations... But the FBI investigation... clearly based, at least in part, on the FBI’s disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy views and the agency’s assessment that such policies fail to safeguard “U.S. interests” as the FBI defines them. The NYT notes that among the events that prompted the investigation were that Trump “refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail...”"

"MSNBC IS A dishonest political operation, not a news outlet. It systematically and deliberately refuses to adopt a defining attribute of a news outlet: a willingness to acknowledge factual errors, correct them, and apologize. That they not only allow their lies to stand uncorrected but reward their employees who do it most frequently — especially when those lies are directed at adversaries of the Democratic Party — proves that they are, first and foremost, a political arm of the Democratic establishment."

"The most recent example is as glaring as it is malicious. On Saturday in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders delivered his first speech for his 2020 presidential campaign in front of thousands of people. MSNBC broadcast the speech live, and anyone can watch the full two-hour event, or just Sanders’s full 35-minute speech, on YouTube. As a result, there’s no confusion possible about what was said. Everyone can see it with their own eyes."

"Indeed, as is almost always true for MSNBC, all of these pleas that they correct their false claim have been steadfastly ignored — no correction issued — because, as I’ve repeatedly documented, lying about adversaries of the Democratic establishment is not merely tolerated or permitted at MSNBC, but is encouraged and rewarded. That’s why they purposely had the very first person to comment on Sanders’s kickoff campaign speech be a paid Clinton 2016 campaign official highly embittered toward Sanders, and it’s why MSNBC does not correct lies no matter how loudly, clearly, or indisputably you document those lies to them."

"News outlets correct lies. Slimy political operations deliberately use lies to advance their agenda and smear their adversaries. MSNBC has proven over and over again that they are decisively in the latter category. This is just the latest but by no means the only or even worst example."

"Every major U.S. war of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing at air questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack... This was exactly the tactic used on February 23, when the narrative shifted radically in favor of those U.S. officials who want regime change operations in Venezuela... they vehemently stated that the trucks were set on fire, on purpose, by President Nicolas Maduro’s forces."

"On Saturday night, the New York Times published a detailed video and accompanying article proving that this entire story was a lie. The humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces. They were set on fire by anti-Maduro protesters who threw a molotov cocktail that hit one of the trucks. And the NYT’s video traces how the lie spread: from U.S. officials who baselessly announced that Maduro burned them to media outlets that mindlessly repeated the lie..."

"Other media outlets endorsed the lie while at least avoiding what CNN did by personally vouching for it. “Humanitarian aid destined for Venezuela was set on fire, seemingly by troops loyal to Mr Maduro,” The Telegraph claimed. The BBC uncritically printed: “There have also been reports of several aid trucks being burned – something Mr Guaidó said was a violation of the Geneva Convention.”"

"That lie – supported by incredibly powerful video images – changed everything. Ever since, that Maduro burned trucks filled with humanitarian aid was repeated over and over as proven fact on U.S. news outlets. Immediately after it was claimed, politicians...U.S. news stars and think tank luminaries...took a leading role in beating the war drums..."

"Everything the New York Times so proudly reported last night has been known for weeks, and was already reported in great detail, using extensive evidence, by a large number of people... While the NYT’s article and video are perfectly good and necessary journalism, the credit they are implicitly claiming for themselves for exposing this lie is totally undeserved."

"That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets..."

"As has been true since President Harry Truman’s creation of the CIA after World War II, interfering in other countries and dictating or changing their governments — through campaigns of mass murder, military coups, arming guerrilla groups, the abolition of democracy, systemic disinformation, and the imposition of savage despots — is regarded as a divine right, inherent to American exceptionalism. Anyone who questions that or, worse, opposes it and seeks to impede it (as the CIA perceived Trump was) is of suspect loyalties at best."

"The all-consuming Russiagate narrative that dominated the first three years of Trump’s presidency further served to elevate the CIA as a noble and admirable institution while whitewashing its grotesque history. Liberal conventional wisdom held that Russian Facebook ads, Twitter bots and the hacking and release of authentic, incriminating DNC emails was some sort of unprecedented, off-the-charts, out-of-the-ordinary crime-of-the-century attack, with several leading Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) actually comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor."

"The level of historical ignorance and/or jingostic American exceptionalism necessary to believe this is impossible to describe. Compared to what the CIA has done to dozens of other countries since the end of World War II, and what it continues to do, watching Americans cast Russian interference in the 2016 election through online bots and email hacking (even if one believes every claim made about it) as some sort of unique and unprecedented crime against democracy is staggering. Set against what the CIA has done and continues to do to “interfere” in the domestic affairs of other countries — including Russia — the 2016 election was, at most, par for the course for international affairs and, more accurately, a trivial and ordinary act in the context of CIA interference."

"In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life."

"But what makes these trends all the more disturbing is that they long predated the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the left in its wake and the . Indeed, since at least the , when first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration acted to protect the interests of the tycoons who caused it while allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and , the indicia of collective mental health in the U.S. have been blinking red."

"Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories."

"After. .. news outlets have published ... emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000..."

"We submitted nine questions to his (Joe Biden's) campaign... that the public has the absolute right to know, including:... whether Biden ever knew about business proposals in Ukraine or China being pursued by his son and brother in which Biden was a proposed participant and, how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement... had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective...."

"Though the Biden campaign indicated that they would respond to the Intercept’s questions, they have not done so. Much of this controversy centers on Biden's aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S... These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid."

"Why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief prosecutor of Ukraine was? The standard answer to the question about Biden's motive — offered both by Biden and his media defenders — is that he, along with the IMF and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant in fighting corruption .... "Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as," wrote the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in what the Post calls a "fact-check.""

"Kessler also endorsed the key defense of Biden: that the firing of Shokhin was bad for Burima, not good for it. "The United States viewed [Shokhin] as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine's corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky," Kessler claims.... But that claim does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their markets to U.S. companies."

"All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son's business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation's most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them."

"It's so ironic they [the Democratic Party] spent four years claiming they are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, and what are they trying to do now? They're trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody."

"[T]he Democratic Party, which now controls the House, the Senate and the White House genuinely believes they have a monopoly on objective truth. They believe they're the party of science and rationality, and that the only way to disagree with them is if you're either a deranged conspiracy theorist or a seditionist, somebody who is engaged in criminal conduct or terrorism."

"And therefore, they genuinely believe, it's not a show. It's not a pretext. They all have convinced one another through this echo chamber that they've created, essentially, the entire media except this network, which is why they want to shut it down, that if you disagree with their orthodoxies and their consensus, you are a threat and a danger."

"[About Twitter being banned in Brazil, Pavel Durov being arrested in France, and Rumble being blocked in Brazil and France:] You see this rapidly escalating, unfolding extremely menacing scheme of censorship which is 'You either remove every dissident, every idea, that we don't like, that we deem false, that we deem harmful, or we will, in the case of France, imprison you and your executives the minute you step foot into the EU, or we'll just block your entire platform from being available in our country at all. And we will only allow those platforms that maintain a closed system of information for our citizens to hear and say only what we think they should be hearing and saying.' This is happening in the democratic world, the obstensibly Western Democratic world. I cannot do anything more in terms of words to express how extreme, how severe, and how dangerous this trend is. We could see it coming for several years now and it is here."

"Ever since [Greenwald] blotted his copybook backing Iraq, he’s played the principled non-interventionist with all the irritating simple-mindedness of a reformed drunk. His new view, nice and simple, is that all intervention is bad, everywhere and every time. So when [Greenwald] hears that the French Army has intervened in Mali, his first-generation moral software picks up the word “intervention” and does the rest, a nice simple Jetsons way of dealing with a wiggly, complicated world. Intervention = Bad; Mali = Intervention; therefore Mali = bad. … What blew me away was the simple-mindedness of it. It was pretty clear that [Greenwald] didn’t know a thing about Mali and, what pissed me off more, he didn’t think he had any reason to learn. That’s one thing he has in common with the Jihadis (and the Baptists too): they all think there’s one right way, and can’t be bothered with local variations. Local schmocal, that’s how you think when you’ve got 'The Truth' on your side."

"When the journalist Glenn Greenwald attacked me as an Islamophobe, insisting that my concerns about Islam were both irrational and a symptom of my own bigotry and white privilege, I responded by challenging him on Twitter to a duel of cartoon contests. He could hold one for Islam, and I would hold one for any other religion on earth. That shut him up immediately."

"Bromidic though it may sound, some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn."

"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

"Dennis Rodman says North Korea is 'not that bad'. Dennis Rodman is deeply stupid."

"Andy, I’ve spent more time overseas than you ever have in your little life, so don’t tell me about I’m laughing this stuff off"

"That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world. We see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over."

"If there are any young people watching: at some point in your life you will become the people you used to make fun of"

"The Harris town hall – a stand-in for the second presidential debate – will start at 9pm ET on Wednesday, hosted by Anderson Cooper"

"Terror em Israel (23/10/2023) Youtube video"

"Anderson Cooper had a realization about a hostage during a live interview with his parents (youtube CNN Oct 24, 2023)"

"Once again, Apple has seized the early lead, launching a revolutionary product that is taking the world by storm. … In its short life, Google's Android operating system has captivated developers and stolen mindshare from Apple... [Apple] is coming under increasing scrutiny for being a domineering control freak hell-bent on secretly undermining its competitors … the movie is starting the same way. And so far, at least, Apple is showing no signs of doing anything differently."

"Apple fans should be scared to death … Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought — and lost — in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are 'better,' but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers (Windows in the 1990s, Android now)."

"Apple's emphasis on short term greed instead of long-term investment will end up hurting the company and its shareholders and customers over the long haul. … What Apple does not seem to understand … is the fate that almost all niche platform providers eventually succumb to — gradual loss of influence, power, and profitability, followed by irrelevance."

"Apple is getting its clock cleaned by Samsung, which is now by far the dominant smartphone maker in the world."

"The Internal Revenue Code of 1954, a document longer than "War and Peace", is phrased -inevitably, perhaps- in the sort of jargon that stuns the mind and disheartens the spirit."

"(A newspaper columnist who disagreed with the judge´s finding was to remark that the guesses had been so educated as to qualify for summa cum laude.)"

"I find that companies are inclined to be at their most interesting when they are undergoing a little misfortune, and therefore I chose the fall of 1966 as the time to have a look at Xerox."

"I found that business life is full of creative original minds -along with the usual number of second-guessers, of course."

"A man´s study reflects himself as he wishes to be seen publicly, but his journal, if he is honest, reflects something else."

"...both company managements and stockholders might well consider a lesson King Lear learned -that when the role of dissenter is left to the Fool, there may be trouble ahead for everybody."

"In the law of torts there is the maxim: Every dog has one free bite."

"Basel has several first-rate restaurants, and it may be that in the view of the central-bank delegates this advantage outweighs the travel inconvenience, for central banking -or at least European central banking- has a firmly established association with good living."

"...Complains that his son has a low opinion of business; attributes this to ´reverse snobbery´"

"On Thursday, March 14th, panic was added to chaos. London gold dealers, in describing the day´s action, used the un-British words "stampede", "catastrophe", and "nightmare"."

"A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste."

"People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician."

"Nancy Reagan became first lady during the height of the feminist movement, and women who were battling for their rights in a male-dominated world saw her as an anachronism. Reagan said her life began when she met her husband. The adoring look she focused on her Ronnie when they were in public became known as "the gaze," adding to the caricature of her as a rich Hollywood socialite who did not understand the concerns of a generation of women coming into their own as professionals and seeking equality. What her detractors failed to understand (and I was among them) was the substantive role she played behind the scenes at the White House in keeping her husband's presidency on track. She took the long view in looking after his legacy, intervening through favored surrogates to keep conservative ideologues from driving the agenda. Her insistence that no president could be considered great without reaching out to Soviet leaders trumped resistance from the right wing of the GOP. She was fiercely protective of her husband's image, less so of her own, and she paid the price. When some of her interventions became known, particularly in the personnel department, she was cast as Lady Macbeth — even though the firings she engineered won praise. … Years later, with the benefit of hindsight and after watching Hillary Clinton's failed effort to achieve health-care reform, I came to believe Nancy Reagan deserved a fairer assessment. I wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in The Washington Post on Jan. 8, 1995, with the headline "Nancy with the centrist face: Derided as an elitist, Mrs. Reagan's impact was unequaled." I made the point that unlike Clinton, who took an office in the West Wing and was upfront about wanting to be a player, Reagan operated undercover, usually through a surrogate, and that she was a force for good. She rarely left fingerprints, but she got the job done, and her job was to play up her husband's strengths and cover for his weaknesses. She did both very well. The piece concluded with this line: "She is without doubt an effective First Lady, and she may yet win our hearts." Soon after I received a handwritten note from Mrs. Reagan saying, "I don't really know how to say this but when something very nice comes from an unexpected source, it's really appreciated — and if you see me in a different light now, I'm happy. I can only hope one day 'to win the heart.' " Later that same year, she cooperated with a NEWSWEEK cover about her reconciliation with daughter Patti Davis, and how the president's Alzheimer's disease had brought the family together after literally decades of turmoil. Another handwritten note arrived shortly after with the lighthearted comment, "We've got to stop meeting like this!" After sharing her thoughts and emotions on her family's difficult times, Reagan said, "Hopefully I'm close to 'winning the heart.' " In looking back at these notes, I realize how much it meant to her to gain a measure of affection after being treated so harshly in the public eye."

"It took her husband's long illness and her grace in caring for him to show her critics what she was made of. Rarely did she spend more than an hour or two away from him, and during the decade of his decline, she guarded his image, his legacy, and his dignity. As his cognitive powers slipped away, eldest son Michael reminded him that he used to be president. "How did I do?" Reagan replied, his characteristic humor and humility intact. In the 1994 letter to the American people in which the former president revealed his illness, he wrote, "I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. When the time comes I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage." In their life together, Ronald Reagan never worried about anything; Nancy worried about everything, carrying a burden few appreciated until the end. She didn't have his gift for storytelling, but she made sure all the parts were in place, and by honoring him, she was true to herself, a woman for all times."

"The presidential debates should offer the American people an opportunity to evaluate the candidates for president and make an informed choice about the future direction of the nation. The debate commission should respect the , but should not be used as a vehicle for stifling dissent and silencing voices when many voters conclude the two-party system makes them choose the "lesser of two evils.""

"Rules are made to be broken and exceptions can be made."

"Johnson (Gary) offers a principled voice for the libertarian philosophy, which has much to contribute to American political discourse whether we agree with every libertarian proposal or not. While I do not agree with the huge cutbacks in defense proposed by Johnson, I strongly agreed with his opposition to the Iraq War under President George W. Bush. While I would not agree with the full scope of his advocacy for the legalization of drugs, I agree with his support for the legalization of pot, his long-held view that the drug war has always been a fiasco and that drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one."

"I support Clinton (Hillary) for president because she is well-qualified for the office and would be a competent, skilled president and commander in chief."

"I do not support Trump (Donald), and believe he would be a disastrous president and ."

"Johnson represents a clear and coherent economic and political philosophy that conservative and libertarian economists can understand and support if they choose."

"Trump has no coherent organizing economic philosophy, spent decades acting like and supporting traditional liberal Democrats, has repeatedly shifted his positions on major issues and has little more trust from economists than he has earned among the general electorate."

"I agree with the libertarianism offered by candidates from former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to Johnson, and on other issues I do not. For example, I agree with the libertarian opposition to infringement on civil liberties in the Big Brother state that has grown with widespread eavesdropping from big government, and I agree with libertarians on their opposition to what is called the , and I believe pot should be legalized (and Jack Daniels should always remain legal!). I do not agree with the degree of laissez-faire advocated by libertarians in an economy that I believe is rigged by big business and their lobbyists and campaign donations."

"Johnson makes a major contribution to our national debates, as did Paul before him. The libertarian perspective is valuable, important and deserves to be considered by all voters. It is also fair to note that Johnson, like Paul before him, has won a fair share of support from younger voters who are the future of the nation. If someone had asked me to predict who would emerge as the leading alternative to Clinton in a poll of respected economists, I would never have guessed that the runner-up to Clinton would be Johnson, and not Trump."

"Trump is that he is a , who now states that he supported the Clintons and other liberals with donations for so long because he wanted to obtain influence with them while they were in power. He has led several businesses to bankruptcy. He has called himself the "king of debt," a description that Johnson or Paul and other leading libertarians would never use to describe themselves."

"While the viewpoints offered by Johnson are rooted in a long-held and consistent philosophy that can be evaluated by those who agree with him, and those who do not, the viewpoints offered by Trump seem to change like the leaves that change their colors when summer gives way to fall. We know what Johnson believes today, and will believe tomorrow. Can anyone suggest we know what Trump will believe tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow?"

"Economists live in a world of economic data, facts and opinions informed by their experiences."

"In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific. Physicists want to show that all things came from one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified."

"Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours… is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?—might be unsolvable."

"Over the last few decades, physics in the grand mode practiced by Hawking and Rees has become increasingly disconnected from empirical evidence. Proponents of string and multiverse models tout their mathematical elegance, but strings are too small and multiverses too distant to be detected by any plausible experiment."

"By the time I was 11 or so Catholicism stopped making sense. Why, if God loves us, would He inflict hell on us, just for skipping mass now and then? That doctrine, which hard-eyed nuns taught in catechism, seemed awfully harsh. Also, I couldn’t imagine how heaven could fail to be boring. Like lots of young people in my generation (I graduated from high school in 1971), I began checking out more exotic religions. I became intrigued by enlightenment, the goal of Hinduism and Buddhism. I envisioned it as a state of supreme bliss and wisdom. It’s like heaven, except you don’t have to die to get there. Seeking enlightenment, I learned meditation and yoga and ingested psychedelics, and I read Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Far from enlightening me, my forays into mysticism deepened my sense of weirdness."

"Science has only existed for a few hundred years, and its most spectacular achievements have occurred within the last century. Viewed from a historical perspective, the modern era of rapid scientific and technological progress appears to be not a permanent feature of reality, but an abberation, a fluke, a product of a singular convergence of social, intellectual, and political factors."

"Of the three great skeptics I interviewed, Popper was the first to make his mark. His philosophy stemmed from his effort to distinguish pseudoscience, such as Marxism or astrology or Freudian psychology, from genuine science, such as Einstein's theory of relativity. The latter, Popper decided, was testable; it made predictions about the world that could be empirically checked. The logical positivists had said as much. But Popper denied the positivist assertion that scientists can prove a theory through induction, or repeated empirical tests or observations. One never knows if one's observations have been sufficient; the next observation might contradict all that preceded it. Observations can never prove a theory but can only disprove, or falsify it. Popper often bragged that he had "killed" logical positivism with this argument."

"Kuhn's recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what Charles Sanders Peirce had defined as the "truth" about nature—made it even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science's authority, to deny that science can ever arrive at absolute truth. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said. "Because that's not what I think the game is about.""

"Feyerabend's Dadaesque rhetoric concealed a deadly serious point: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he truly believed that it had no more claim to truth than did astrology. Quite the contrary. Feyerabend attacked science because he recognized—and he was horrified by—its power, its potential to stamp out the diversity of human thought and culture. He objected to scientific certainty for moral and political, rather than for epistemological, reasons."

"Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? ...the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton."

"Newton's version of gravity violates common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of space? ...Newton's formalism nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny."

"In Theories of Everything... John Barrow argued that Gödel's incompleteness theorem undermines the very notion of a complete theory of nature. Gödel established that any moderately complex system of axioms inevitably raises questions that cannot be answered about the axioms. The implication is that any theory will always have loose ends. Barrow also pointed out that a unified theory of particle physics would not really be a theory of everything, but only a theory of all particles and forces. The theory would have little or nothing to say about phenomena that make our lives meaningful, such as love or beauty."

"Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy. Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions."

"Einstein had drawn attention to nonlocality in 1935 in an effort to show that quantum mechanics must be flawed. ...Einstein proposed a thought experiment—now called the EPR experiment—involving two particles that spring from a common source and fly in opposite directions. According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position... Deriding this effect as "spooky action at a distance," Einstein argued that it violated both common sense and his own theory of special relativity, which prohibits the propagation of effects faster than the speed of light; quantum mechanics must therefore be an incomplete theory. In 1980, however, a group of French physicists carried out a version of the EPR experiment and showed that it did indeed give rise to spooky action. (The reason that the experiment does not violate special relativity is that one cannot exploit nonlocality to transmit information.)"

"Of course, the apparent disarray could have stemmed entirely from my own ignorance. But when I revealed my impression of confusion and dissonance to one of the attendees, he reassured me that my perception was accurate. “It’s a mess,” he said of the conference (and, by implication, the whole business of interpreting quantum mechanics). The problem, he noted, arose because, for the most part, the different interpretations of quantum mechanics cannot be empirically distinguished from one another; philosophers and physicists favor one interpretation over another for aesthetic and philosophical—that is, subjective—reasons."

"I had barely sat down when he began to tell me... that science writers were "ignoramuses" and a "terrible breed" who invariably got things wrong: only scientists were really qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt as well."

"One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is almost always right."

"I begin to discern the paradox lurking at the heart of Karl Popper's career... Everyone says this opponent of dogmatism is almost pathologically dogmatic."

"Popper scoffs at scientists’ hope that they can achieve a final theory of nature. "...I think we have gone very far, but we are much further away." He... returns with his book Conjectures and Refutations. ...[H]e reads his own words with reverence: "In our infinite ignorance we are all equal.""

"Can a skeptic avoid self-contradiction... the Popper paradox? And if he doesn’t, if he preaches but fails to practice intellectual doubt and humility, does that negate his work? Not at all. Such paradoxes corroborate the skeptic’s point... the quest for truth is endless, twisty and riddled with pitfalls, into which even sharp-eyed seekers tumble. In our infinite ignorance we are all equal."

"Nowhere is patriarchy's iron fist as naked as in the oppression of animals, which serves as the model and training ground for all other forms of oppression. Its three basic strategies — the club, the yoke, and the leash — operate similarly in the oppression of women and minorities. The club strategy is to kill animals for gain, sadistic pleasure, and the "affirmation of manhood." It is domination through brute force. The yoke strategy is to domesticate animals to carry burdens and pull vehicles; supply eggs, wool, and milk; and provide flesh and skins. It is domination through enslavement. The leash strategy is to tame animals to provide the psychic benefits of direct rule of master over pet. It is domination through deceit. … It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people — catching and lynching blacks or "smoking out" Jews during the Holocaust."

"Amid an extended, international discussion of and female confession, it has occurred to me that sometimes it can be difficult for women to understand one another’s pain. We are often told that experiences of oppression are actually the result of the supposedly overwrought emotional set point of womanhood, a pressure that compels us to keep our stories to ourselves — or, in the worst of cases, to look upon each other’s stories with excessive scrutiny, behavior prescribed by the poison of internalized misogyny."

"For many of us, living under the Trump administration has cast everything into sharper relief: It’s as if we’ve all been given fancy polarized sunglasses with which to more clearly see the fault lines of the patriarchy. It’s no longer possible to ignore what was there all along."

"It occurred to me how very tired I sometimes feel as an outspoken feminist. ... Trolls are trying to silence women, and I've installed a fiery declaration within myself to never give in, but it's incredibly hard, and gets harder as my platform as a writer grows. What didn’t occur to me initially is that West has spent years in the trenches fighting this endless, thankless fight, and maybe she needs a goddamn break. I had this revelation again, much more profoundly and emotionally, about my own mother while watching ’s new film, Lady Bird. ... Often, my mother and I clashed when she denied me freedom, but only because she had been harmed by the dangers she knew lay ahead for her daughter. I did so many risky, awful things, and then lied to her about them, because I never felt I could be honest with her. I should have known she wasn’t judging me. I should have known that she had done it all before, that even though she wouldn’t have used the word "feminist" to describe herself at the time, mostly she just didn’t want me to have to be so very tired. ... Walking home from Lady Bird on the kind of night that New York fall fantasies are made of, I resisted the urge to call my mother, because I thought I might cry until the universe ripped apart at the seams. But then I called her anyway. I sobbed as I told her I had no idea how impossibly hard she had been trying."

"For this manifestation to be as forceful as it possibly can, we have to work to find solidarity in each other’s stories, as differing as their inciting perspectives may be. The patriarchy sands out the edges of our rightful infuriation, making it harder to see in any light but our own. This blindness is part of what denies us community-forming solidarity and part of what has allowed widespread and harassment to continue for so long. The sinister idea that there is a limit to the total number of accusations of "sexism" that society will bear has made us trend toward the egotistical in our understanding of oppression, but it is happening to all of us, and it is happening all of the time."

"Understanding the total impact of the patriarchy on the female experience is endlessly elusive. ... It is a constant process, perpetually blurred by the ebb and flow of so many epiphanies clouded by self-doubt."

"I know I will almost certainly forget it all again, but I hope next time, I will be able to recall quickly. For this moment to become a movement, we have to keep trying to remember."

"I just think she’s masterful. She gets such incredible answers that these famous people haven’t said to anyone else, which requires this diabolical scheming but also tremendous empathy. It’s a very specific kind of puzzle."

"I really want to keep my mind open to all possibilities. If I make up my mind in advance what I believe about something ... I stop listening. We all stop listening once you've made up your mind … I want to be curious. I want to maintain my curiosity about what the answers to the question might be. And I want to hold out for the possibility that someone will surprise me."

"…I have a flat spot right in the front of my head from trying to break down walls my entire career, forcing diversity of thought and opinion into newsrooms and onto the air. Whatever else you do with your lives, I hope you remember to fight those battles, too."

"I was drawn to journalism because of the need to be the necessary voice - not to force my opinions on others but to broaden the stage for the debate…"

"I just keep my head down and try to accomplish what my parents set out for me: that there wasn't anything I couldn't do. But I also look up periodically and think, "Who else can I pull along?" Because it's a failure if I'm up here by myself."

"President Trump doubled down Sunday on his push for the use of an anti-malarial drug against the coronavirus, issuing that goes well beyond scant evidence of the drug’s effectiveness as well as the advice of doctors and experts. Mr. Trump’s recommendation of hydroxychloroquine, for the second day in a row at a White House briefing, was a striking example of his brazen willingness to distort and outright defy expert opinion and when it does not suit his agenda."

"Standing alongside two top public health officials who have declined to endorse his call for widely administering the drug, Mr. Trump suggested that he was speaking on gut instinct and acknowledged that he had no expertise on the subject. Saying that the drug is “being tested now,” Mr. Trump said that “there are some very strong, powerful signs” of its potential, although health experts say that the data is extremely limited and that more study of the drug’s effectiveness against the coronavirus is needed. [...] Mr. Trump, who once predicted that the virus might “miraculously” disappear by April because of warm weather, and who has rejected on issues like climate change, was undaunted by skeptical questioning. “What do you have to lose?” Mr. Trump asked, for the second day in a row, saying that terminally ill patients should be willing to try any treatment that has shown some promise."

"Even as Mr. Trump has promoted the drug, which is also often prescribed for patients with , it has created rifts within his own . And while many hospitals have chosen to use hydroxychloroquine in a desperate attempt to treat dying patients who have few other options, others have noted that it carries serious risks. In particular, the drug can cause a that can lead to ."

"Hydroxychloroquine has not been proved to work against Covid-19 in any significant clinical trials. A small trial by Chinese researchers made public last week found that it helped speed the recovery in moderately ill patients, but the study was not peer-reviewed and had significant limitations. Earlier reports from France and China have drawn criticism because they did not include control groups to compare treated patients with untreated ones, and researchers have called the reports anecdotal. Without controls, they said, it is impossible to determine whether the drugs worked. But Mr. Trump on Sunday dismissed the notion that doctors should wait for further study."

"Understood as a central consolidated power, managing and directing the various general interests of the society, all government is evil, and the parent of evil... The best government is that which governs least."

"A spirit of hostile interference against us... checking the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

"A torchlight procession marching down your throat."

"What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect?"

"America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy."

"The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood -- of "peace and good will amongst men.""

"Supporters of the All-Mexico movement stated that Mexicans "would learn to love her ravishers," while columnist and editor John O'Sullivan argued that the influx of white Americans into recently conquered territory would lead to both uplift and absorption. In his 1845 declaration of "manifest destiny," O'Sullivan described an "irresistible of Anglo-Saxon[s]" bringing with them "the plough and the rifle... schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses," that would ultimately lead Mexicans to "simply melt into American society as they experienced the benefits of American civilization." Describing the "Mexican race" as "perfectly accustomed to being conquered," an 1847 New York Sun editorial echoed O'Sullivan by asserting that "the only new lesson we shall teach is that our victories will give liberty, safety, and prosperity to the vanquished.... To liberate and ennoble... not to enslave and debase-is our mission.""

"We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."

"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to "save Western civilization," without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that Christ could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God's will, but to enlist God's assistance in maintaining our "continually increasing consumption." And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."

"She is incredibly articulate. She means what she says and she says what she means. Her metaphors are what make her poetry, and they ring true."

"Occasionally speaking of Black people generally, in conversation with the still youthful Lorraine Hansberry: "They are beautiful, child.""

"From one end of the South to the other law and order have broken down. A public climate has been created in which a Negro’s life is worth no more than a White man’s whim."

"It is worth noting that if Emmett Till had been a Mississippi farm boy instead of a Chicago lad on vacation in Mississippi, the world probably would never have known his fate."

"The forward surge of the Negro people is the most distinctive and progressive feature of Southern politics."

"How, then, should American literature deal with these people, crushed for centuries beneath an insufferable weight of exploitation, calumny and derision, yet always rising, their presence and their struggle ever mocking the strident pretensions of the nation?"

"Much of what Negroes fight for today is not to gain new ground but to restore positions once dearly won and foully taken away."

"He had a mordant wit, always saw the humorous side to keep us all 'cracked up,' and could recite poetry by the yard. At the same time, he had an ability to put words down on paper with a speed and precision... He had a far-above-average ability to marshal his facts through well-documented research and translate his material into well-written and convincing prose."

"[An] altogether commanding personality... His voice was very deep and his language struck my senses immediately with its profound literacy, constantly punctuated by deliberate and loving poetic lapses into the beloved color of the speech of the masses of our people... The things he taught me were great things: that all racism was rotten, White or Black, that [emphasis in the original] everything is political; that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny.”"

"Above all none can forget his honesty and utter sacrifice."

"[Burnham was] one of the loveliest human beings I've ever met... A rich cultural apostle who swam in music, poetry, and literature... always pleasant company... a great facility to move in all kinds of circles... a most eloquent public speaker [who] could engage an audience at will."

"A man touched with grace, easy to be with and reassuring. In his writings, lectures, and conversation, he never dissembled. His seriousness, manifest in his painstakingly careful speech, was leavened by high humor. The love that people bore him was demonstrated in his hosts of friends—from the teenagers on his Brooklyn block, through the bearded youngsters who came to him for counsel, to the patrician figure of Du Bois, his mentor and his colleague."

"He led primarily by virtue of the power of attraction of his example... He left his imprint on a whole generation of Southerners... He was a hero in the practical struggles for equality and justice in the Deep South who had marched often in the shadow of death in Willie McGhee country in Mississippi, and under the guns of the police chief “Bull” Conner in Birmingham, Alabama... He was a talented writer and an incomparable orator. He was a fine scholar and an inspiring organizer of social action."

"Even today, you know, when I’m kind of in deep middle age, older people will come up to me who remember my father and — who just remember. He had a lot of grace, and was a very welcoming person, and he’s remembered in that way."

"Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies."

"I said to myself ‘I'm going to own this job. I'm going to make sure that I know this better than all of these guys and they're not gonna be able to push me around"

"I think right now the biggest challenge of what the U.S. is facing in terms of standing up to China is the corporate sector"

"You’ve got corporations that see 1.2 billion people in China and those are many potential consumers for them. China is aware of that market potential. You’re dealing with a communist country and it’s foreign to our approach to governance and business. But our companies made a deal: get access to the sheer volume of people there in exchange for playing by the CCPs rules, whatever those might be. That is a very dangerous position to be in, particularly as the U.S. government is now recognizing them as the single biggest threat the country faces."

"It is a lake in width, it is enclosed in masonry, and it measures about three miles around! Superb! Few architects think in measurements as big as that... Any architect would thrill at the harmony of the facade, an unbroken stretch of repeated pillars leading from the far angles of the structure to the central opening, which is dominated, by three imposing towers with broken summits... The Vat rises in fair majesty against the heavens... All the ancient power of the temple and its gods is puissant still. It surrounds those who look upon the wonder. The eyes sweep upwards over the rising storeys, up, up, to the mounting towers, to the pure firmament, and pause subdued. It is ever thus. Some power overcomes, some mysterious spell is caste, one never look upon the ensemble of the Vat without a thrill, a pause, a feeling of being caught up into the heavens. Perhaps it is the most impressive sight in the world of edifices. The whole place is covered, once you open your eyes to it, columns, lintels, surbases, panels, pediments, jambs of doors and windows. One says that this holy sanctuary contained a wondorus statue of God Vishnu carved from precious stone... The portico is magnificent in a way not unfamiliar. One is at once in harmony with the plan. Nothing exotic about it, nothing that shocks Western traditions, simply grandeur and dignified beauty as we know it in our own architecture.""

"And he [Bryant] was a smart enough man to know that all kinds of great football players from Alabama, some of whom just happened to be black and were not able to play for him because of the prevailing prejudice, in many cases young men who were on their way to the pros, and he knew as well that he had the law of the nation on his side now if he wanted to play them, and that only local prejudice kept him from recruiting them, and most important of all, he was the one man in all of Alabama who could go ahead and recruit them, and stand up to George Wallace, and bring the culture along with him. And for 13 years, when he could have made a great difference, he did very little and did not really dissent from the biases of the region."

"We underestimated the willingness of these peasants to pay the price. We won every set piece battle. Westy believes that he never lost a battle. We had absolute military superiority, and they had absolute political superiority, which meant that we would kill 200 and they would replenish them the next day. We were fighting the birth rate of a nation."

"in fighting the Jewish-Bolshevik regime of Russia that Germany is performing a service for Western civilization"

"Do it if you are creative or a risk-taker. Don’t let your talents go to waste. It’s so freeing to be in charge of your destiny on some level, to rise and fall on your abilities."

"They get isolated, isolated, isolated, and their circles become ever smaller. They never meet real people. Except online, and that’s not real."

"Be your genuine self. Don’t edit yourself. Women especially do this because we’re raised to be people-pleasers"

"You’ve got to tune out your self-doubts and understand that it’s okay to fail"

"I absolutely would not be doing this if it weren't for her"

"I just refuse to accept that this -- this thing: Like, January 6th if Democrats win, fireside chat if Republicans win -- is the way things just are gonna work now. I don't accept the idea that there's one set of rules for him and another for everyone else. We can't accept a status quo in our elections where, if one side wins, they have to scratch and claw to withstand the lies and the legal challenges and the violent mobs. And if the other side is successful, and they're invited to measure the drapes and gather around the fireplace. I mean, yes, the nature of preserving democracy and institutions and norms is that you uphold them, even for people like Donald Trump who have tried to tear them down, I get that. But I'm just saying that this thing, this, is not a sustainable equilibrium. One side upholds liberal democratic norms, the other subverts and tries to destroy them. It's gonna break, one way or the other. I don't know how it ends up or who wins, but that central struggle didn't dissolve because the insurrectionist won more votes this time."

"The economic impacts of slavery abolition in the mid-nineteenth century have some striking parallels with the impacts of radical emission reduction, as several historians and commentators have observed. Journalist and broadcaster Chris Hayes, in an award-winning 2014 essay titled "The New Abolitionism," pointed out "the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth" and concluded that "it is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.""

"Ed Schultz, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes provided us with the very fair coverage we received on MSNBC."

"I spend every morning at my desk working on a book about the Trusts but my progress seems lamentably slow. However, it "do move." The worst of it is the work is really so distasteful. It keeps me poking about and scavengering in piles of filthy human greed and cruelty almost too nauseous to handle. Nothing but the sternest sense of duty and the conviction that men must understand the vices of our present system before they will be able to rise to a better, drives me back to my desk every day."

"The methods by which the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Fields, Rockefellers, Mackays, Floods, O'Briens, and the coal and iron and salt Pashas are heaping up enormous fortunes are methods, not of creation of wealth, but of the redistribution of the wealth of the masses into the pockets of monopolists."

"The bottom truth is that Governor Altgeld is of that type whose brains and character alike do not make it possible for their personal success to suffocate their love of justice. He is a man whom the trusts, corporations, and concentrated millionairism of the country have found it impossible to bend, break, or seduce. If such men as Altgeld the Democrat and Pingree the Republican survive, monopoly will perish and monopoly by a sure instinct of self-preservation has set itself to destroy them by ridicule, slander, and by every means of financial and political assault. One of the most regrettable features of public opinion in this campaign is that so many of the American people have allowed themselves to be played upon by these sinister interests who are catering to every prejudice and using every ingenuity of misrepresentation to destroy public confidence in the few public men who are standing like giants on guard for the public."

"Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor."

"Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty."

"If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know."

"The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things for humanity."

"It illustrates what Ruskin calls the "morbid" character of modern business that the history of its most brilliant episodes must be studied in the vestibules of the penitentiary."

"Monopoly is business at the end of its journey."

"We have chartered the self-interest of the individual as the rightful sovereign of conduct; we have taught that the scramble for profit is the best method of administering the riches of earth and the exchange of services. Only those can attack this system who attack its central principle, that strength gives the strong in the market the right to destroy his neighbor. Only as we have denied that right to the strong elsewhere have we made ourselves as civilized as we are."

"Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the few."

"Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its possessors, and pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in palaces."

"Probably millions of men read or heard Mr. Lloyd's ideas without being aware of the real authorship. But I judge that with this condition he was well content. No man ever entered such a fight with a smaller share of personal vanity to gratify. He desired that his countrymen should be informed of existing conditions, but not that he himself should gain fame or rewards."

"[T]o fight a complex, mechanized war, a disciplined army responsible to a central command is far more effective than a range of militias reporting to a crazy quilt of political parties and trade unions."

"I realized something else about the terror in the Congo and the controversy that came to surround it. It was the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera. In its mixture of bloodshed on an industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying media campaigns in half a dozen countries, it seemed strikingly close to our own time. (Introduction, page 4)"

"Furthermore, unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.(Introduction, page 4)"

"From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder."

"It is always tempting to believe that a bad system is the fault of one bad man."

"In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history."

"The movement's other great achievement is this. Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth."

"In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag."

"It is impossible to watch Vladimir Putin's arrogant invasion of Ukraine without being appalled by its savagery. Dead men and women strewn on the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs. Russian soldiers raping women, sometimes in front of husbands or children. Russians seizing loot of every size, from cellphones to giant John Deere wheat-harvesting combines. And, again and again, testimony about torture: beatings, electric shocks, near suffocation with plastic bags."

"Before the U.S.S.R.'s collapse, in 1991, its rulers portrayed that war starkly: The Whites were evil reactionaries who tried to delay the glorious triumph of Soviet rule. But Putin, whose passion is for empire, not communism, has a different view. He would love to restore the power of both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, which extended over territory far larger than his own shrunken Russia of today."

"Long before the civil war tore Russia apart, the challenges of holding such a huge country together, against threats without and centrifugal forces within, had been handled with widespread oppression as well as tight control from the top."

"A less democratic regime than czarist Russia would be hard to imagine. Starting in the 17th century, serfdom enslaved a high proportion of the country’s citizens—a system maintained by whips, chains, the threat of separating families and exiling rebels to Siberia, and the massacre of tens of thousands of serfs who staged hundreds of revolts over the years."

"As in all despotisms, power rested upon violence. In the eyes of the regime, Russian citizens were either loyal subjects who knelt to the ground when the czar passed or deadly enemies most likely bent on assassination. The idea of a space in between barely existed. Over the centuries, five czars were indeed stabbed, strangled, shot, or otherwise assassinated, as were several grand dukes and other high officials."

"Vladimir Nabokov's father, a democratically minded politician who had been arrested by a Communist Red Guard, managed to escape and flee the country, but not before the family’s cook made him caviar sandwiches for the journey."

"In a nation so deeply xenophobic to begin with, the ultimately victorious Communists never forgot the foreign troops who had tried to strangle their baby in its cradle."

"One more aspect of the Russian Civil War reverberates directly with the conflict we are now watching play out. The war was not just about who would rule Russia, but about whom Russia would rule."

"Outlying areas of the old Russian empire took advantage of the Red-White struggle to battle for independence. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states did so successfully, Ukraine unsuccessfully. The fighting in the latter, among Reds, Whites, and several rival Ukrainian forces, convulsed cities in the headlines today: Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol."

"Although mortal, existential enemies, both Reds and Whites were united on one point: They wanted the boundaries of the Russia they hoped to control to be as wide as possible. Both sides had little but hatred for these non-Russian independence movements, especially the one in Ukraine, a land so rich in grain, iron, and coal."

"Many environmentalists say that the Ganges has become an embarrassing symbol of government indifference and neglect in a country that regards itself as an economic superpower. "We can send a shuttle into space, we can build the [new] Delhi Metro [subway] in record time. We can detonate nuclear weapons. So why can't we clean up our rivers?" Jaiswal laments. "We have money. We have competence. The only problem is that the issue is not a priority for the Indian government.""

"Over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Oates, and Scott. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure."

"These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen."

"I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluge with catalogs for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent."

"We are entering a new period in the history of the American melting pot. Immigration has stopped, for one thing, and assimilation has begun. A bigger factor, however, is the great social change going on in America, a process that inevitably lines up the poor against the money-bags, the trade unionists against the exploiters, the men who battle for human rights against those who fight for property rights. Race lines vanish in such a conflict; the class issue cuts through everything. Even the Negro question is affected and will finally be settled as this fight goes on; and this question is surely the touchstone of all racial problems in America."

"This bourgeois form of art for art's sake is no longerworthy of one's comment or attack. It has only one useful purpose that I can still see: it numbs the minds of the exploiters. Let them continue to support it and be stultified."

"If Hitler consolidates his power we will see a world reaction infinitely worse than that which followed the events of 1848. Every sign of the faintest liberalism amongst the middle class intellectuals will be drowned in blood. The workers will be massacred, terrorized, forced into a medieval serfdom. It is war-time. We must close ranks or be annihilated. Hitlerism will spread over Europe and sweep America. Unless we unite. Unless there is a united front of all the workingclass parties and liberal groups. The Socialists and liberals may form such a front, leaving out the Communists. They may piously ignore the massacre of Communists, deeming themselves more respectable and hence safer. But this is a form of suicide, for Mr. Villard will find himself consigned to the hangman by an American Hitler as swiftly as any Communist. Every anti-fascist is needed in this united front. There must be no base factional quarrels. Leaders who stand in the way of a united front should be swept aside by the rank and file. We are faced with the death of the whole workingclass movement. We cannot waste time. We cannot quibble. How can anyone underestimate this thing? But I feel an apathy in America, a failure to react to the events in Germany that is appalling. Forward to the united front! There need be no hypocrisy or ignoring of basic differences. Each party and each group can retain its individuality. But at once! Let us unite to fling back Hitlerism and crush it forever!"

"Without an understanding of the economic basis of war, no one can be its determined or effective opponent. Sentimental appeals will not hold back a nation inflamed by patriotic lies. Only the man who understands clearly that he is being asked to die for J. P. Morgan's investments abroad, or the markets of the oil and machinery trusts, will be immune to the customary lies about small nations, enemy atrocities, or democracy. That is why it is so necessary to spread a knowledge of Marxian economies; that is why it is so necessary to maintain a clear-cut Marxian platform in politics, based on the realities of the class war. Prepare for the next war! Prepare by studying Marx and Lenin, by studying the Russian Revolution. Prepare to fight Wall Street, instead of dying to protect its wealth. Inoculate yourself against the liberals who will want to lead you into another capitalist war for whatever holy and subtle reason. Prepare against the Walter Lippmanns, the Rabbi Stephen Wises, the Woodrow Wilsons, Spargoes, Bohns, Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kropotkins, Albert Thomases, Arthur Hendersons, of the next war. They are in your midst now; ask them what they will do, SPECIFICALLY, when the nation is mobilized. Prepare."

"War may have depended at times in the feudal past on the whim of emperors and kings. Today it is a respectable part of Big Business. It is as premeditated as a selling campaign by a large corporation. It is the last resort of national salesmanship."

"The idea of money is so dominant in this country that anyone not part of money is made to feel ashamed."

"I have chosen the Communist discipline. Because Communism projects into the future, and not into the past, as does Fascismo, which is only a defense corps trying to save the rottenness of the past."

"There will be another World War soon. Everything we think and do in the next decade will fall within that shadow, as Walt Whitman's generation fell under the Civil War. There is no escape; there is no alternative for the writer as for other men, but struggle or suicide. One will be forced into an attitude. I prefer life. It is life that has created the Communist movement, with a philosophy so tragic and honest that it can face the thought of the next world war, prepare for it, and go on building. No prayers, or pieties, or hocus-pocus of Fascist rhetoric but the habit of facing every day the hardest facts of life; building with them, seeing beyond them, using them for a great new objective. That is the way to write well, and it is Communism."

"The dark ages had returned; modern thought was again burning in the flames of a new inquisition, the Jews again afflicted with the yellow badge of shame."

"Hitler is a demagogue who has falsified history. He succeeds because his followers are too ignorant to know that he lies. The great mass of Jews in the world today are not millionaire bankers, but paupers and workers. I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be told of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto. Yiddish literature is saturated with the ghetto melancholy and poverty. And Jewish bankers are fascists everywhere. Hitler has received their support, both with money and ideas. Some of his most important secret conferences were held in the home of a Jewish banker. They gave large sums to his party before he came to power. Hitler's whole program is to save the banking and profiteering capitalist system. The attack on the Jews is merely a piece of demagogy, to throw the hungry German masses off the trail of their real enemy. No, every Jew is not a millionaire. The majority of Jews belongs to the working-class and to the bankrupt lower middle class. It is natural that in the present hour so many of them are to be found in the Socialist, Communist and trade union ranks. Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race."

"It has become necessary now in America to fight against this great fascist lie. Recently, groups of anti-Semitic demagogues have appeared in this country. They are like Hitler, telling the hungry American people that capitalism is Jewish, and that an attack on the Jews is the best way of restoring prosperity. What folly! What criminal deception and bloody fraud! And there are signs that this oldest of swindles will grow in America. The defense of the Jewish race against these fascist liars and butchers has become one of the most necessary tasks for every liberal and radical. This is not only a problem for Jews to meet; it has become the problem of the workers and farmers whose hunger the fascists try to appease with the empty husk of anti-Semitism."

"Mike Gold's initiation into the radical movement occurred in 1914 when he blundered into an unemployment demonstration in Union Square, listened to the "rebel girl" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and bought a copy of The Masses. Between 1915, when he contributed his first poem to Eastman's magazine, and 1921, when he joined the editorial staff of The Liberator, Gold lived the wandering and exciting life of the Bohemian-anarchist artist. He wrote three one-act plays for the Provincetown Players and spent a summer with the happy and hard-drinking group at the Cape. In New York, after attending rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, he would join Eugene O'Neill and anarchist friends at a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, the "Hell Hole," and listen to O'Neill recite "The Hound of Heaven." Dorothy Day, a "rebel girl" of the Village and, later, the much-admired and selfless editor of the Catholic Worker, remembers at this time that she and Gold were reading Tolstoy together. "He used to make fun of my religious spirit," she wrote later, "but he himself was in sympathy with the Christianity expressed by Tolstoi, a religion without churches or a priesthood. Mike had a religious upbringing in his home on the East Side and liked to sing Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew hymns.""

"Gold is important to recover because he is one of dozens, hundreds of writers whose legacy and output was silenced by the Red Scare and Cold War. Gold’s project was to create a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people, and Gold understood that a working-class literature would also have to be a radical literature, and a racial literature. And he understood that such a project required conflict with a literary establishment. It would mean a literary class war."

"My novels are usually ignited by a question–a philosophical, spiritual, moral, political quandary. My stories are usually imagined from a particular scene. Place is very important in all my fiction. (2021)"

"History shows that often artists first envision the change feminist activists seek to bring about."

"I’ve always regarded writing as a vocation more than a career. Vocation as in “calling,” as in “being summoned,” from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.”"

"I still want to change the world, and if my political principles have remained steady, the belief in my own powers has shifted. Now I can say that the goal of my stories is understanding. As I grow less prescriptive, I hope to become more receptive."

"As a feminist, I want to involve readers in the story and give them time to pause, reflect, argue, and engage."

"I don’t like the term “political correctness” because conservatives tend to employ it to distract from serious racial, class, national, and gender discrimination. It’s a divisive phrase that perpetuates the so-called culture wars. I first heard the term in the 1970s, when it was used among progressive people as a safeguard against our own rigidness and the rigidness of other people on the left. Many political meetings ended with a period of evaluation and this was one of the problems acknowledged as something to avoid. The term has been bowdlerized since then. I welcome a range of opinions in my classroom and we always discuss the importance of genuine disagreement on the first day of term. I aim for a stimulating, surprising, awakening, collegial, and safe classroom, and try to foster this by encouraging everyone to speak and by creating assignments in which students work in a variety of small groups. We speak, we agree, we argue, we laugh, we learn."

"Literature is the story of our many and diverse lives—in fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Unfortunately, women’s books are much less likely to get published then men’s books. They are much less likely to be reviewed then men’s books."

"the literature that we read in the late sixties--I graduated from university in 1969--was really British literature by middle-class or upper-class white men. My people, working-class people, were not represented in the material I was reading."

"I think this American reflex judgment that if you write political fiction you are writing didactic fiction is funny because I see my fiction as the opposite. I see myself as somebody who is learning as I write, motivated, mostly, by questions. For me the process of writing a novel is to be thinking about the questions."

"One of the reasons I became a writer was to try to develop some kind of empathy for my fellow human beings. If I'm always writing about the same kinds of people, I'm not going to get very far."

"I'm very much an Irish Republican, in the sense that I believe that the troops should be out of the north and that the north should be part of Eire."

"I didn't actually intend to write a murder mystery when I wrote Murder in the English Department. That's just what happened when these people got together. Every book is, in some sense, a mystery."

"I care a lot about accessible prose. People often fail to see the subtlety in a sentence that has been honed, worked, and reworked, unless it's written by Ernest Hemingway and has a penis in it."

"We also should develop an international consciousness of our work as writers - that's crucial to our own individual welfare and to the kind of imaginative collectivity that I mentioned."

"to have a steady diet of American writers is like eating Rice Krispies for 365 days; it is boring. I find international literature appealing because, as a writer, I'm curious about place and find it provocative to see what people do with place. I'm very interested in rhythms in language, in seeing and hearing on the page how people write English differently. And, of course, it's fascinating to see how translators translate into English differently."

"for me, being out as a lesbian has to do with honesty and the vitality I get from honesty. It isn't a moral act or a question of conscience so much as it's a way of engaging more fully in the world by being who I am. In some sense, coming out as a lesbian writer is a process of discovery, a journey, just as coming out as a writer from a working-class family or coming out as an American writer [she laughs]. And it's something that continually surprises me with new dimensions."

"As a writer, I still strongly identify as a worker, partially as a consequence of working with those other people [the co-editors of her first two books] and partially as a result of my class background. I see my work emerging from some kind of imaginative collectivity, not from solitary genesis."

"I feel as if I've been trespassing my whole life in one way or another: Literally trespassing, as someone who has lived abroad a lot and traveled widely; but trespassing morally, in the sense that I've made some unconventional choices in my life and, although I certainly am not a practicing Catholic anymore, I still have echoes of a Catholic conscience that tell me that I'm trespassing. I'm also trespassing in the sense of being from the working class and moving into a middle-class environment; and trespassing in the sense of transgressing literary conventions because that book plays with a lot of different forms."

"I am not saying that working-class men started that war. But a number of them were complicit in fighting it. The rhetoric of Vietnam, particularly in the last five years, has made all of the soldiers heroes. Not just survivors, but heroes. And I don't think that's true, and that's one of the things that has led us into further aggression in the Middle East and in Central America. So there is some urgency in confronting this...To say that working-class men during that war were heroes and to exonerate them is the worst kind of castration. It's taking all their power and all their culpability away from them. In the book I am trying to look at working-class protest against the war and support of the war. One of the things that really bothers me is that often working-class lives are presented as having no choices."

"I have come to depend upon Valerie Miner as an uncommonly honest novelist, humorous, acute, and kind."

"Miner is a writer of reach, audacity, range, uniquely important to understanding our time... She gives us the beat of everyday urban life""

"Mr. Weiner grabbed for a pair of spectacles that looked a little like [his mentor] Chuck Schumer’s. These were his driving glasses—even when he wasn’t driving. His press secretary seemed nervous about what Mr. Weiner might say in the car: Mr. Weiner is the of back-seat drivers…“My problem is, I generally know how to get there,” Mr. Weiner explained. “It’s part of the ethos of living in New York—figuring out how to do things in a better way.”"

"Mr. Weiner likes to describe the Mayor as a weak sister, rolling over for the Republicans when he’s not kissing up with donations. Whenever he sees the Mayor, Mr. Weiner said, it’s all reasonably cordial. After all, nothing’s personal in politics. “I think he likes me,” Mr. Weiner ventured. (The Mayor does not, say his aides.)"

"When it comes to siblings, Hollywood has a quirky history of power brothers, from such behind-the-desk deal-makers as the Warners, the Cohns, and the Selznicks to forces behind the camera: the Coens, the Safdies, the Sylberts, and the Russos. And then there’s Harvey and Bob Weinstein."

"Prison’s been hard on Harvey [Weinstein] …He’s now living as his assistants once did, in the clutches of a perverse and petty system, overseen by guards who demand utter obeisance, deference, and subjection. Imagine one of the world’s foremost consumers of the luxury-hotel suite and capacious bathroom trying to survive an infirmary dormitory with no-seat toilets. In court, his people had to shut off his iPhone for him; he’d never quite mastered the mechanics. But now there’s no phone—save the one he’s allowed to access for only an hour a day as, maintaining his innocence, he orchestrates his appeal from a room he can use only when no one’s there."

"Last year, Donald [Trump] (married to ex-model Melania Knauss and father of a baby boy named Barron) announced on The View that if he weren't Ivanka's father, maybe he'd be dating her. "I think it's the human condition to be frequently embarrassed by your parents," Ivanka says, generally speaking."

"Lately, friends imagine they hear Donald [Trump]'s intonations in Ivanka's surprisingly sexy voice, a voice that sounds like she gargles with Cristal. The inane locutions of her generation — those "like"s and "you know"s — have been almost banished from conversation in favor of the more lawyerly "if you will" and other such Donald-like tropes….Ivanka could tell you about the Putzmeister pump throwing concrete a thousand vertical feet atop what stands to be the tallest residential building in the world, a site she's currently supervising in Chicago and one of 33 construction sites all over the globe. Instead, she is in the living room of her Park Avenue pad, pointing out the subtle architecture of some earrings."

"The hair, an elegant patisserie swirl of butter cream, is as remarkable as the gingerbread slab riding the head of 's equally celebrated ex-husband. Never look a day over 28, famously admonished his then-wife. She recalls this, adding ruefully, "It's going to cost me a fortune.”"

"And though she has a bad back from the competitive skiing that proved her lift ticket out of Communist Czechoslovakia, Ivana [Trump] is on her way to Aspen for the holidays—and St. Moritz after that. "I can ski backwards on one ski. And foldblinded!" she exults. "But I don't go through moguls very often." This could be an apt metaphor for her love life: She recently announced that after four months of marriage, she'd filed for separation from her fourth husband, Rossano Rubicondi, an actor-slash-model-slash-arm-charm 23 years her junior."

""I wear black all the time," Ivana notes."

"Less jowly now thanks to crappy jailhouse cooking—his country-boy haircut and jaunty hunting cap retired for a CEO’s side part—Chapo looked surprisingly guapo in a business suit. (And at 5’ 6”, not nearly as diminutive as his nickname Chapo—“Shorty”—would imply.) U.S. Marshals would knot his necktie just before he entered the room because mirrors can be smashed and weaponized. A former secretary observed in court he’d never seen Chapo in a suit. Early in the trial, Chapo would absently tug at his collar. Months in, he’d grown accustomed to the yoke."

"At trial, it became clear that in the macho, mustache-man world of drug-trafficking, Chapo had as much use for women, seducing them with saccharine forevers, then putting them to work in his stable—as buyers, as Blackberry-tapping go-betweens to preserve his anonymity on deals—involving their family members because there’s no glue stronger than blood."

"Does Chapo speak in tongues? “I think he has,” [Chapo’s sister] Bernarda told me. By all accounts, he has spent many hours in this church. There’s been some signature Pentecostal healing-hand work, too. “Many brothers who are pastors have laid hands on him and prayed for him, and with a contrite heart, that’s when he cries.”"

"People in La Tuna miss Chapo, the town’s greatest, wiliest patrón. The young women debate whether he’s finally lost his looks, having only late-period pale-and-doughy mug shots to go by. (Avoiding stepping outside where one might be seen and subsisting on takeout tacos takes a toll on the body.)"

"“I asked Chapo why he had to kill people,” recalled one former lieutenant on the [witness] stand. “And he said, “either your mom’s going to cry or their mom’s going to cry.""

"The Hollywood Reporter had published an article about [witness for the prosecution] Kaja Sokola with the headline "Anonymous No More: Inside the Complicated Life of Harvey Weinstein’s Key Accuser." Mr. Weinstein’s publicist, Juda Engelmayer, spotted the writer, Phoebe Eaton, in the courtroom and approached to provide Mr. Weinstein’s take on it: "He said it was fantastic." "I’m not out to please him," she said. "OK, I’ll just ignore you in the courtroom," Mr. Engelmayer said, before heading out to the hallway and toward the elevator."

"Phoebe Eaton's New York Magazine look at the blue-collar vs. the blue blood Senate GOP primary in New York provides some excellent insight into John Spencer and KT McFarland and indicates the Clinton campaign may need to rent extra office space simply for the oppo research. However, it is a letter that McFarland wrote to her parents years ago that has garnered the most attention: "Shortly after she discovered [her brother] Mike had AIDS, she wrote her parents lengthy, angry, almost Gothic letters in which she outed her brother, blamed her father for his troubles as well as those of her and her other siblings, and cut off contact with her parents. 'Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?' she wrote. 'He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.' The father's behavior had surfaced for McFarland as recovered memory. She said a shrink put her up to writing the letter; reached for comment, her mother, Edith Troia -- KT has since made up with her parents -- denied the account. 'Wouldn't that make a great book?' she said. 'Please be kind. You could be casting dark shadows on this whole race.'" Unanswered: where did Eaton get the letters [and] will [K.T. McFarland’s political consultant] Ed Rollins keep talking to the press (or, at least, to Eaton)…?"