Authors From The United States

"On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to answer some questions! Except it failed. It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the pretense of a hearing without a real hearing. It was designed to deflect and confuse. ... The worst moments of the hearing for us, as citizens, were when senators asked if Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate . I don’t care whether Zuckerberg supports Honest Ads or or GDPR. By asking him if he would support legislation, the senators elevated him to a kind of co-equal whose view on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t. Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. It has exposed at least 87 million people’s data, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. We should treat him as a danger to democracy and demand our senators get a real hearing."

"The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to."

"In one sense freedom is always in crisis, just as beauty is, and honor and truth-all those things which man has made for himself as a garment against the ever-present blasts of the barbarian spirit,"

"Eternal vigilance is the condition, not only of liberty, but of everything which as civilized men we hold dear."

"[Republicans in Hess's youth] represented the only strong anti-imperalist political position. Anti-imperialist? Republicans? Uh-huh. But Republicans were not smart enough to call it that. They let it be labeled isolationism, as though they wanted the United States to sneak off the world stage, slam the doors, and bolt the windows. The underlying Republican argument, that we should trade with everyone but not interfere with or intervene in their internal politics, was lost behind that unattractive label."

"The work that's being done 24/7 at Antiwar.com not only honors Randolph Bourne's contribution to the libertarian tradition; it also helps to assure that that tradition will continue and grow."

"[Professor Jennifer] Burns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives or liberals for that matter, refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism—a system in which huge corporations, aided by the state, dominate a heavily-regulated and centrally-directed economy. This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate, this is what the New Left opposed. One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me thirty years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labour, specialise in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. Bookchin told me that he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions."

"His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic—until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired."

"Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely. People are still reading his work. They're still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases. The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote or said it: "War is the health of the State.""

"Apart from his comment on the propensity of people to follow where their leader beckons, even when for a change he may actually be taking them where they ought to go, his book includes these comments, none of them very cheering"

"The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions."

"The pavement ritual showed the industry's diurnal business face, all hustle and press agents and shaking hands, with the selected star brought down from studio Olympus (or at least the Hollywood Hills) before a public audience in broad daylight, a scene which recalls Alexander Chase's observation that "the movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a god in captivity"."

"Memory is the thing you forget with."

"Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death."

"The rich man may never get into heaven, but the pauper is already serving his term in hell."

"When Alexander Chase wrote, "To understand is to forgive, even oneself," he summarized much of what has been learned about forgiveness through the ages. Forgiveness requires at least a bit of understanding, sometimes quite a bit."

"The banalities of a great man pass for wit."

"For the unhappy man death is the commutation of a sentence of life imprisonment."

"The rich man may never get into heaven, but the pauper is already serving his time in hell."

"People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction."

"Gods are born and die, but the atom endures."

"When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government."

"There are few successful adults who were not at first successful children."

"To attempt suicide is a criminal offense. Any man who, of his own will, tries to escape the treadmill to which the rest of us feel chained incites our envy, and therefore our fury. We do not suffer him to go unpunished."

"Walking in space, man has never looked more puny or more significant."

"A soft refusal is not always taken, but a rude one is immediately believed."

"The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible."

"Psychiatry's chief contribution to philosophy is the discovery that the toilet is the seat of the soul."

"To the average cigarette ]]smoker]] the world is his ashtray."

"Without the spice of guilt, sin cannot be fully savored"

"Music has charms to soothe a savage breast — but not the unmusical one."

"To remain young one must change. The perpetual campus hero is not a young man but an old boy."

"One who understands much displays a greater simplicity of character than one who understands little."

"All generalizations are false, including this one."

"The movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a god in captivity."

"More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer Care about religion."

"At least we’ll hear less about corn subsidies and Corinthians II, or is it Two Corinthians? Discuss. No, don’t! Stupid, stupid people. Again, that’s Trump talking, not me. He uses that word to describe nearly everyone not named Donald J. Trump. He’s presented no governing philosophy, no policy details, nothing resembling even-keeled judgment. He’s running a combustible celebrity feud fest, and you love it."

"The Iowa caucuses are no more predictive than a gasbag on an ethanol high swaying from a bridge in Madison County."

"A majority of Republican caucusgoers are white, native-born and believe that electing a demagogue will make American white again."

"You’re supposed to be vetting, Iowa. You’re supposed to be culling out the crazies. You’re supposed to recognize the fraud of Ted Cruz and how Donald Trump is playing you. For all your touted small-town verities, you’re not doing your job. Your bull manure detector is broken."

"The good people of Iowa have debated issues ranging from nuclear Armageddon to universal health care. And then there’s 2016, when the top two Republican candidates in the dwindling hours before caucusgoers pick a nominee are throwing around this question: “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” It was Donald Trump who first raised the issue of Hawkeye State imbecility, in a mocking reference to a crush that Iowans had on Ben Carson last fall. And it’s the odious Ted Cruz who has been using Trump’s very words to goad Iowans into proving that they are not, in fact, so stupid as to back an ego-inflamed reality television star who makes fun of them."

"The problem is not that the people of Iowa are stupid. They are not, by most measurements. It’s that Iowa looks nothing like the rest of America. As a result, the winners, more often than not, are nationally unelectable extremists."

"The appeal of any agreement depends on its terms."

"The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them – or wished to see them... No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life."

"[Perhaps] the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania may open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when we wallowed — nameless shapes — in the primaeval slime."

"No ruler is ever really dethroned by his subjects. No hand but his own ever takes the crown from his head... When he ceases to lead... the revolt which casts him from power is only the outward manifestation of his previous abdication."

"It was well to have thus once really lived."

"To the masculine mind there appears to be something strangely exhilarating in the thought of a woman being abruptly torn from her home without sufficient time to put her wardrobe in order, and to all the men responsible for this voyage the most delightful feature apparently of the whole affair was the fact that I should be forced to get ready in five hours for a seventy-five days' voyage around the world."

"Even in my childhood my sympathy for the heroes in the fairy tales was always keenest at the moment when they waved their hands in farewell and turned their faces at last towards the magical adventures that stalked about impatiently awaiting their advent in the strange countries where their havens lay."

"Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible... one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry."