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Claggett Wilson, Runner Through the Barrage, Bois de Belleau, Chateau Thierry Sector; His Arm Shot Away, His Mind Gone, ca. 1919, watercolor and pencil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin, 1981.163.6

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The notion that there must exist final objective answers to normative questions, truths that can be demonstrated or directly intuited, that it is in principle possible to discover a harmonious pattern in which all values are reconciled, and that it is towards this unique goal that we must make; that we can uncover some single central principle that shapes this vision, a principle which, once found, will govern our lives – this ancient and almost universal belief, on which so much traditional thought and action and philosophical doctrine rests, seems to me invalid, and at times to have led (and still to lead) to absurdities in theory and barbarous consequences in practice.

Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008 first pub. in Four Essays on Liberty, 1969),  pp. 47f.

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This cracks me up. 

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I saw the state of those... who, in reading the scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the holy scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. These said, it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, I, I, I, it is I myself, that have been the Ishmael, the Esau, &c. For then they saw the nature of wild Ishmael in themselves; the nature of Cain, Esau, Corah, Baalam, and of the son of perdition in themselves, sitting above all that is called God in them.

A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, &c. of George Fox, chapter 2.

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Somehow we cannot let go of our self-rejections. Somehow we cling to our guilt, as if accepting forgiveness fully would call us to a new and ominous task we are afraid to accept ... It is shocking to see how many people choose the certainty of misery in order not to have to deal with the uncertainty of joy. This is a choice for death, a choice that is increasingly attractive when the future no longer seems trustworthy.

Henri Nouwen, Peacework, pp. 39, 41.

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But police don’t need training to choose not to shoot folks like [Magdiel] Sanchez [, a deaf man who was shot by police after failing to comply with spoken commands. He was suspected of no crime and posed no threat]. They just have to stop treating noncompliance as a justification for escalation.

David M. Perry, "4 Disabled People Dead in Another Week of Police Brutality," The Nation (Sept. 22, 2017).

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Classics such as "Where Do the Children Play" and "Trouble" brought with them a great sadness; confronted with the simplicity, the naïveté even, of the sentiments in these gentle lyrics, it was impossible not to think of how the world has changed and darkened since these songs were written and last performed. Even “Moonshadow,” that lullaby of Buddhist acceptance, carried with it the sting of longing for less dire times. Being at that concert, hearing those songs again, sung with conviction by that man, was like being allowed to spend a night in one’s childhood home, with everything back the way that it was from some preëxistential, innocent moment—with even one’s family members frozen in time the way that they were decades ago. 

Howard Fishman, "The Unlikely Return of Cat Stevens," The New Yorker (September 15, 2017).

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TRUMP: I think if we continue to create jobs at levels that I’m creating jobs, I think that’s going to have a tremendous impact -- positive impact on race relations.

Reporter: Your remarks today, how do you think that will impact the racial, sort of conflict, today?

TRUMP: The people are going to be working, they’re going to be making a lot of money -- much more money than they ever thought possible. But that’s going to happen.

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Therefore, perish strife both from among gods and men, and anger, wherein even a righteous man will harden his heart -- which rises up in the soul of a man like smoke, and the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey. Even so has Agamemnon angered me. And yet -- so be it, for it is over; I will force my soul into subjection as I needs must; I will go; I will pursue Hector who has slain him whom I loved so dearly, and will then abide my doom when it may please Zeus and the other gods to send it. Even Heracles, the best beloved of Zeus -- even he could not escape the hand of death, but fate and Hera's fierce anger laid him low, as I too shall lie when I am dead if a like doom awaits me. Till then I will ... bid Trojan and Dardanian women wring tears from their tender cheeks with both their hands in the grievousness of their great sorrow; thus shall they know that he who has held aloof so long will hold aloof no longer. Hold me not back, therefore, in the love you bear me, for you shall not move me.

Achilles, speaking to his mother Thetis, shortly after Patroclus’s death at Hector’s hands. Illiad, 18.107ff., Butler translation. 

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Literature is a transnational country. The authors we read have always been the citizens of the other world, border-crossers and out-laws. And they have always strangered their own language.

O’Grady, Kathleen, and Hélène Cixous. “Guardian of Language: An Interview with Hélène Cixous.” Women’s Education des femmes 12.4 (1996): 6–10.

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David Bowie, 1993, photo by Herb Ritts. Published at NOWNESS, 2011. 

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[T]he young, this new generation who would soon file out in Occupy and, a few years later, join the Sanders campaign, were hanging on his every word as they listened to West define what it meant to be radical, what it meant to be on the Left. "That means we cut radically against the grain of the last forty years, especially in the American empire, where we have been told lies. Unfettered markets generating self-sufficiency, prosperity, and justice is a lie!. . . Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate elites are sucking so much of the blood of American democracy in such a way that more and more people are just useless, superfluous. And they don’t care! They think that they can get away with it because there’s been no resistance of large scale! And they think in the end, the chickens don’t come home to roost, that you don’t reap what you sow . . . we simply say at Left Forum," and here he backed away from the mic, lowered his voice and smiled, "We stand for the truth." 

Connor Kilpatrick, “Everybody Hates Cornel West,” Jacobin 23 (2016).

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Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind

William Wordsworth, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."

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The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.... People are constantly trying to use you to help them create the particular illusions by which they live. This is particularly true of the collective illusions which sometimes are accepted as ideologies. You must renounce and sacrifice the approval that is only a bribe enlisting your support of a collective illusion. You must not allow yourself to be represented as someone in  whom a few of the favorite daydreams of the public have come true. You must be willing, if necessary, to become a disturbing and therefore an undesired person, one who is not wanted because he upsets the general dream. But be careful that you do not do this in the service of some other dream that is only a little less general and therefore seems to you to be more real because it is exclusive!

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 91f.

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litany for survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours: For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive - Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn

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Major American political artist and photographer, Ben Shahn: Sep. 12, 1898 - 1969…

Above: Break Reaction’s Grip, 1946 - offset lithograph (Smithsonian)

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Neoliberalism disarms us in another sense as well. For all its rhetoric of freedom and individual initiative, the culture of the market is exceptionally good at inculcating a sense of helplessness. So much of the language around college today, and so much of the negative response to my suggestion that students ought to worry less about pursuing wealth and more about constructing a sense of purpose for themselves, presumes that young people are the passive objects of economic forces. That they have no agency, no options. That they have to do what the market tells them. A Princeton student literally made this argument to me: If the market is incentivizing me to go to Wall Street, he said, then who am I to argue?

  William Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 2015.