opinion
Also in this section:
Jackson, The Day of the Martyrs
Dean, Restoring the American community
Fisher, Panama's election campaign begins in earnest
Gush Shalom, Sharon's plan a recipe for annexation and war
Human Rights Watch, Don't sweep Bolivian massacre under the rug
A year's collection of thoughts to bear in mind
Bernal, The day someone assassinated President Remón
 
Bear in mind... (a blast from the past)
We should beware of all those who plaster the landscape with large portraits of themselves.
Never was such false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is their interest to go to war.
For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is finished and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
It is harder to release a nation from servitude than to enslave a free nation.
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible --- and achieve it, generation after generation.
Live for yourself, you will live in vain. Live for others and you will live again.
The key to immortality is first to live a life worth remembering.
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Frugality without creativity is deprivation.
If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you started.
Babies don't need fathers, but mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be taken care of.
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
It feels so good to be one of the few who see The Truth --- a sensation relished by our own native fundamentalists, libertarians, marxists, free-marketers, postmodern leftists, as well as a great many regular Republicans and Democrats, differing only in who they credit with sight and who qualifies as sheep!
In the Roman empire, only the Romans voted. In modern global capitalism, only the Americans vote. Not the Brazilians.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear --- not absence of fear.
There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong appear right.
If you realize too acutely how valuable time is, you are too paralyzed to do anything.
Katharine Butler Hathaway
War, like any other racket, pays high dividends to the very few. The cost of operations is always transferred to the people who do not profit.
The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great victory --- excepting a great defeat.
Arthur, Duke of Wellington
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first then seek to win.
Never be bored, and you will never be boring.
Whenever people say "we mustn't be sentimental," you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, "we must be realistic," they mean they are going to make money out of it.
People unfit for freedom --- who cannot do much with it --- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.
Somewhere between the Angels and the French lies the rest of humanity.
Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.
Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it.
One should never underestimate the cunning of humans when they want to find out things. Especially irrelevant things. The more irrelevant the things, the more cunning they get.
You have to leave room in life to dream.
Insignificant events can take on monumental proportions when your head is full of practically nothing.
There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without principle.
If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
We don't want a bigger piece of the pie --- we want a different pie.
We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
The candidate has become relatively unimportant as long as he can be properly managed. The candidate must be bright enough to handle the material furnished to him, but not too intelligent, because there is always the danger that an intelligent candidate may come up with unpopular or controversial ideas of his own, and thereby destroy a carefully contrived campaign strategy.
Well behaved women rarely make history.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.
A career is born in public --- talent in privacy.
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.
We have done almost everything in pairs since Noah, except govern. And the world has suffered for it.
Remarkably, Nixon looked like Pinocchio's psychotic uncle, and was later to share some other Pinocchio characteristics.
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right... an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
I shall write without indignation or partisanship: in my case the customary incentives to these are lacking.
I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just.
The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings.
There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
All things that a man owns hold him far more than he holds them.
Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
No really profound sense of human equality can ever emerge from a philosophy rooted in a stance of human superiority over nature.
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant.
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is duty, life is slavery.
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
Reaction is not Revolution. It is not revolution when the oppressed adopt the manner of the oppressors.
It's a rather tedious fact of life that most of us who are confined to the human condition spend a great deal of time wishing to be something we're not.
Most of the news the world receives comes from and is directed at a minority of humanity --- understandably so from the point of view of the commercial operations that sell news and collect the lion's share of their revenues in Europe and the United States. It's a monologue by the North.
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Pressure? This is just a football match. When you do not know how to feed your children, that is pressure.
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Whether it be fast sex, fundamentalist religion, cheap novels, empty-headed movies, booze, dope, sword'n'sorcery fantasy, endless television watching, fast food or miniature golf, we run from dealings with the Real World like ants from Raid.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
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