Jews From The United States

"If wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks."

"I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising."

"Greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.... Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics."

"You get that a lot. "If you care so much about taxes, why don't you pay more, and if you care so much about wages, why don't you pay more?" And I could do that. The problem is, it doesn't make that much difference, and I have discovered a strategy that works literally a hundred thousand times better...which is to use my money to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better. And so, for example, the 15-dollar minimum wage that we cooked up [in Seattle) has now affected 30 million workers. So that works better."

"I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization."

"We have a long history here of integrating the technologies closer together. This is what customers have been asking us to do. It is what we are doing. It is working extremely well. There is much, much more to come here."

"I love this idea of human-machine partnerships because in my mind it’s always been very clear. It’s not about humans or machines, it’s about humans and machines."

"What would I do [with Apple]? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

"Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room.."

"You don't have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream."

"Every technology creates good and bad. You can sit here and say, "AI is really bad, we shouldn't have AI" - that's nonsense. We have to figure out how to use it in a responsible way, that's our job."

"Good fielding and pitching, without hitting, or vice versa, is like Ben Franklin's half a pair of scissors -ineffectual."

"The players are not interested in the score, but merely in how many runs are necessary to tie and to win. They take nothing for granted in baseball. The idea is to win. The game's the thing."

"Ty was an intellectual giant. He was the most fascinating personality I ever met in baseball. To him, a ball game wasn't a mere athletic contest. It was a knock-'em-down, crush-'em, relentless war. He was their enemy, and if they got in his way he ran right over them."

"Maybe I’m not in the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame like so many of my baseball buddies, but I’m happy I had the chance to play pro ball and am especially proud of my contributions to my country. Perhaps I could not hit like Babe Ruth, but I spoke more languages than he did."

"There's Moe Berg over there. He knows 12 languages and is a pretty fair hitter, but none of them languages is going to help him when he's up there at the plate. You've gotta know the pitcher's language, and I was teethed on a baseball bat. Good luck, Moe; but all them seven languages you know ain't gonna do you no good now. I got the world's smartest roomie. He can speak seven languages but he can't hit in any of them. I ain't learned him no hittin' and he ain't learned me no learnin'."

"The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change. ... A proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time."

"When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines."

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

"Michael Walzer, probably the most distinguished philosopher of justice in war, repeatedly points to India’s Bangladesh war as a canonical example of a justifiable humanitarian intervention, in a radical emergency when there was no other plausible way to save innocent human lives."

"Average Americans have little or no influence over the making of U.S. government policy. ... Wealthy Americans wield a lot of influence. By investing money in politics, they can turn economic power into political power."

"For him, political symbolism is not a value addition to the idea of state; it is in fact representative of the idea itself. Indeed, owing to their existence in the abstract, political ideas and beliefs need a medium of expression."

"Writers who opted out of the referential system and who avoided or escaped the common experience are not part of the Jewish political tradition, even if they are still Jews writing about politics. Karl Marx on class struggle, Sigmund Freud on transference and political leadership, Emile Durkheim on socialism and "moral education," George Simmel on the philosophy of money—these text do not fall within the tradition. Baruch Spinoza's political theology does, despite his excommunication, for Spinoza writes always with the tradition in mind: the Hebrew Bible is his first text; the greatest of medieval Jewish philosophers, Moses Maimonides, is his crucial reference. Modern secular writers like Ahad Ha-am (Asher Ginsberg) and Micha Josef Berdichevsky, schooled in the communities of eastern Europe, still know the tradition and work within it, or at least start from it—even if one of their purposes is an antitraditionalist critique: criticism is a form of engagement. Many of their successors, by contrast, are largely ignorant and entirely disengaged."

"The state is invisible...(it) needs to be symbolised before it can be loved."

"Disobedience, when it is not criminally but morally, religiously, or politically motivated, is almost always a collective act, and it is justified by the values of the collectivity and the mutual engagements of its members."

"According to liberal political theory, as first formulated by John Locke, any individual citizen, oppressed by the rulers of the state, has a right to disobey their commands, break their laws, even rebel and seek to replace the rulers and change the laws."

"Heroes, while it was cancelled last year for low ratings on the network, ironically was the number one downloaded show in the world that year above shows like Lost and 24 and that kind of thing. For a show like Heroes that had all of these illegal downloading, pirating, I wore that as a badge of honour. That's exactly the kind of fan that you want! The kind that actively goes out and find your show."

"Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything."

"Stieglitz, in America through photography, has shown us, as far as possible, the objectivity of our outer world. I speak of that photography in which the genius of man leaves to the machine its full power of expression. For it is only thus that we can reach a comprehension of pure objectivity. Objective truth takes precedence over Stieglitz in his work. By means of a machine he shows us the outer life."

"AS A KID I WAS PROMISED an America - An America I believed in - and I insist on living - and dying - in that America, even I have to create it myself."

"When I make a photograph, I make love."

"I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession"

"Then, one afternoon he turned me [Stieglitz, in 1941] loose, alone, among the several boxes of [his photo-series:] 'w:Equivalents'. He had learned to trust me.. ..A couple of hours later I came out in tears. I had been through a tremendous experience. It was like the thunderstorm I felt in my head once in Paris.. ..Music has done this to me many times, but though I already deeply loved photographs, nothing like this had happened to me before.. .Stieglitz, amused and compassionate, waited until I could speak.."

"There is a reality — so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That's what I'm trying to get down in photography."

"I have always been a great believer in today. Most people live either in the past or in the future, so that they really never live at all. So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere."

"I know exactly what I have photographed [in his series 'Equivalents', 1925 - 1934]. I know I have done something that has never been done.. .I also know that there is more of the really abstract in some 'representation' than in most of the dead representations of the so-called abstract so fashionable now."

"Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze."

"Nearly right is child's play"

"Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture."

"Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings.. .You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today."

"to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone.. .I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life.. .My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them."

"Man: [looking at a Stieglitz's photo of 'Equivalents'] Is this a photograph of water? Stieglitz: What difference does it make of what it is a photograph? Man: But is it a photograph of water? Stieglitz: I tell you it does not matter. Man: Well, then, is it a picture of the sky? Stieglitz: It happens to be a picture of the sky. But I cannot understand why that is of any importance."

"..he persisted in following his instinctive feeling that the photographic image was more beautiful than anything the human hand could do to it. In the middle of his activities [for 'w:Photo-Secession' and 'w:291 (magazine)' ], he still found time to greet the new [20th] century with the penetrating tenderness that characterizes his work - photographs of a locomotive, an airplane, of the rising changing city, and the Steerage, that strange picture of immigrants returning to Europe, with his prophetic split organization of form."

"It seems odd to think of you at 'Lake George' tonight – I can smell the outdoors – and hear it – and see the stars – So often before I went to bed at night I would walk out toward the barn and look at the sky in the open space. There was no light little house – there were no people – there was only the night – I will never go back again – maybe to stand just for a moment where I put the little bit that was left of Alfred [Stieglitz], her husband] after he was cremated – but I think not even for that. I put him where he would hear the lake. – That is finished."

"We have to be grown-ups, I think [when discussing the payment of funds today to prevent climate harm which may be decades in the future]. There are lots of things we do where the investments come way, way in the future. Educating 4-year-olds . . . that's an investment that goes way into the future as well."

"Putting a low price on valuable environmental resources is a phenomenon that pervades modern society. Agricultural water is not scarce in California; it is underpriced. Flights are stacked up on runways because takeoffs and landings are underpriced. People wait for hours in traffic jams because road use is unpriced. People die premature deaths from small sulfur particles in the air because air pollution is underpriced. And the most perilous of all environmental problems, climate change, is taking place because virtually every country puts a price of zero on carbon dioxide emissions."

"Carbon prices must be raised to transmit the social costs of GHG emissions to the everyday decisions of billions of firms and people."

"In sum, the accommodation of the Republic is not to the spokesmen for the many, which is to say that it is not political. Instead, the accommodation is to the few, or the few as they were in their youth, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, who must be tested by the conversation in order to determine their fitness for philosophy. This is the peculiarity of the Republic: to speak out on the most dangerous of things and to exercise restraint or a rhetoric of indirection in the discussion of that which seems least likely to endanger the city, real or imagined. In slightly different terms, what Socrates calls dialectic enters the city surreptitiously, and it must do so in order to make the city safe for philosophy. In exchange for this safety, philosophy offers to the city a foundation for justice that is exaggerated in the account of the beautiful city but in its more sober version is verified by the course of Western history."

"My own view is that there basically is no alternative to a market solution. The reason is, if you look around, who are we talking about that’s going to solve the problem: it’s you and me. There are billions of individuals, millions of firms, thousands of governments, hundreds of nations, and for them to take action, they’re going to have to have incentives. The kind of incentives we’re talking about; they’re not speeches - we can sermonize all day - but the incentives of market prices. [This requires us to] raise the prices of goods and services that are carbon intensive, and to lower the ones that are less carbon intensive."

"When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods."