Journalists From New York City

"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."

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

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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)"

"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."

"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)"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty."

"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."

"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."

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

"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.""

"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."

"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"

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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.""

"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."