People From Detroit

"Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous."

"Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad —the maddest of all being the historian's belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it —our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors."

"I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped, even with training, to use their feelings as psychohistorical research tools, although there is a whole new generation of psychohistorians just now beginning to write who are able to do so. To expect the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer [...]. Whenever I speak to a scholar of the emotional development necessary to make a good psychohistorian and get a blank look of total incomprehension, I try to find a way to leave the subject of psychohistory altogether. My listener usually is in another world of discourse where emotional reactions are not considered crucial to the results."

"Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. [...] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development."

"Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.""

"I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science)."

"There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades."

"Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians — childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on — suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books."

"Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks."

"Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why."

"The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us. That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life."

"Airbags are a lot of baloney, no matter what Allstate says or no matter what the DOT says."

"On occasion, people in power will sing a new tune once absolutely compelled to do so. In 1967 Henry Ford II declared angrily that if the government's safety standards were imposed, it "would shut down the industry." A decade later, in 1977, on NBC's Meet the Press, Mr. Ford recognized, "We wouldn't have had the kinds of safety built into automobiles that we have had unless there had been a federal law.""

"right now I’m re-reading and re-reading Robert Hayden’s poems, which are absolutely beautiful and brilliant."

"Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down to help with struggling and doing without and being colored all through blue Monday? Till way next Sunday?"

"This man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered."

"Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed."

"Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him."

"What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?"

"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love..."

"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."

"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."

"I argue with lots of things, but I do not argue with my ears."

"By the RIAA's terms, we commit piracy every time we share files on the Internet. In reality, the RIAA pirated almost all the 400 million CDs sold in America last year, since the people who made the music didn't get paid for them."

"I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and I hate Michigan."

"I played this game to win a championship. I am a champion, and I think The Bus’ last stop is here in Detroit."

"He's always signing autographs, and I think he enjoys it more than the fans do"

"What good is the moon if you can't buy or sell it?"

"Greed is all right, by the way. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

"I think "immoral" is probably the wrong word to use...I prefer the word "unethical"."

"This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago."

"Actually I don't. I've never played with a bass player before, so I wouldn't even know. It wouldn't feel like it's missing, I just think it's normal … I prefer it that way so I only have to concentrate on Jack."

"I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like."

"We never really cared about all the things that other people cared about, you know? Like, people recognizing me on the street never interested me. I've always been kind of suspicious of the world, anyway, so it's pretty easy for me to live in my own little world."

"The White Stripes weren't all about Jack White's howling, ripping guitars, even if that's where the conversation tends to go in certain circles. The fact is, Meg White's minimalistic style was the perfect counter to Jack's shredding, a primal dynamic that gave their tunes that definitive garage stomp. Jack provided the flash, Meg provided the feel."

"A really unique feel and super heavy because of the space between the hits. Very influential on me as a teenager. I often think of her when doing certain kick and cymbal hits together. —"

"We've never had problems. We love each other, understand each other, and get past anything."

"I wasn't brought up with any religion, actually."

"We were like a moth right next to the flame. It's like, do any more and you go down. We were so tired. One final lap, and then have a rest."

"It's in this book I was reading. Apparently, there's a little red demon dwarf that haunts the city, and before every major bad thing that's happened, it's appeared to somebody. Last time, he appeared in a Cadillac."

"I was able to afford a car that didn't break down every five minutes."

"The very wise and wealthy financiers of the world--going way back, even before Rothschild's time--have observed that the world was a pretty rocky place to live in, and that nations were always fighting over something or other, there was always somebody who was trying to conquer somebody else, and wars were universal. Too bad about that, but that's the way it is. So we--the bankers--found out that if we loan money to them that we'll get paid back - they don't question what the interest rate is because they're fighting a war! And if they can win the war they can just plunder the victim and pay us whatever we want out of the plunder - it doesn't cost them anything really. Then the issue comes up of what happens if one of these nations decides not to pay us? Ah! The answer is very simple: if they refuse to pay us back we'll finance an opposing nation, a revolutionary group somewhere else to become an enemy of that nation and attack it, and destroy it, invade it. We'll create another war, in other words, in order to get our money back, we'll finance this side to attack that side. And so, by financing all sides in a war, and keeping the world divided up into warring fractions so that no one unit is particularly stronger than the other, the banks can continue to finance all sides of wars forever, and always collect their interest, because they have the ability of putting one nation against another nation against another nation to collect their debts."

"We must choose between two paths. Either we conclude that Americans have lost control over their government or we reject this information as a mere distortion of history. In the first case we become advocates of the conspiratorial view of history in the later we endorse the accidental view. It is a difficult choice.The reason it is difficult is that we have been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories, and few people will risk public ridicule by advocating them. On the other hand, to endorse the accidental view is absurd. Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception."

"The so-called charity of collectivism is a perversion of the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan who stopped along the highway to help a stranger who had been robbed and beaten. He even takes the victim to an inn and pays for his stay there until he recovers. Everyone approves of such acts of compassion and charity, but what would we think if the Samaritan had pointed his sword at the next traveler and threatened to kill him if he didn't also help? If that had happened, I doubt if the story would have made it into the Bible; because, at that point, the Samaritan would be no different than the original robber – who also might have had a virtuous motive. For all we know, he could have claimed that he was merely providing for his family and feeding his children. Most crimes are rationalized in this fashion, but they are crimes nevertheless. When coercion enters, charity leaves.Individualists refuse to play this game. We expect everyone to be charitable, but we also believe that a person should be free not to be charitable if he doesn't want to. If he prefers to give to a different charity than the one we urge on him, if he prefers to give a smaller amount that what we think he should, or if he prefers not to give at all, we believe that we have no right to force him to our will. We may try to persuade him to do so; we may appeal to his conscience; and especially we may show the way by our own good example; but we reject any attempt to gang up on him, either by physically restraining him while we remove the money from his pockets or by using the ballot box to pass laws that will take his money through taxation. In either case, the principle is the same. It's called stealing."

"Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people's money; which, of course, is why it is so popular."

"From the city of angels off the Pacific Ocean. Good morning, good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation, around the world. I'm George Noory. Welcome to America's most listened-to late night talk show, Coast to Coast AM."

"If they think their dead grandmother is visiting them at night, more power to them. They don't need me telling them (it's) true or not true. There are those few people who may challenge the facts and say some of the stuff may not be true. I say to them, "Chill out, relax and have an open mind.""

"Well, with prophecy you got to see what happens."

"I wonder if Chupacabras are...baby Mothmen?"

"Almost sounds like Bigfoot doesn't it?"