1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5323
5324
5325
5326
5327
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8b05086 | The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anticapitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement, the military, and the White House. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that d.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| d6b08e5 | Johnston wrote how by 1990, "Trump's inability to pay his debts had put him at risk of losing his casinos."64 The rules of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission required casino owners to have enough liquidity to pay their bills or see their ownership license revoked. Trump would either get a government rescue package or declare bankruptcy. Casino regulators, Johnston wrote, documented that Trump was down to his last $1.6 million.65 He ha.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| f1bd2f6 | Prisoners are ideal employees. They do not receive benefits or pensions. They earn under a dollar an hour. Some are forced to work for free. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot alter working conditions or complain about safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages and working c.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 6ce7203 | We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workpl.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 78cb2d3 | If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative," Hudson said. "If the socialist parties and media don't come forth with an alternative to this neofeudalism, you're going to have a rollback to feudalism. But instead of the military taking over the land, as occurred with the Norman Conquest, you take over the land financially. Finance has become the ne.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 99b494c | When a population becomes distracted by trivia," wrote the cultural critic Neil Postman, "when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a nation finds itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility."72 Con artists and swindlers exploit the frustrations and an.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 0bb067a | But I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport." --Chris Hedges" | Susan Abulhawa | ||
| dffac23 | The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats openly pillage and loot. Programs instituted to protect the common good--public education, welfare, and environmental regulations--are being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of colo.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 8804053 | The mantra of the "least worse" does not work--look at the steady deterioration in American politics. The "least worst" paves the way for the worst." | Chris Hedges | ||
| ea8c518 | Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money, and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke's elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality, and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the si.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| ad2d049 | All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America--the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement--developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the .. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 644dc2a | What Orwell feared were those who would ban books," Neil Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in .. | Chris Hedges | ||
| b1bfed5 | Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 073b7dc | Hey, Ernessa, where the fuck are you? | Rachel Klein | ||
| c70dc7b | Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he'd had any effect on her at all. | Maile Meloy | ||
| da67666 | When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his... He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead .. | Maile Meloy | ||
| c3abf33 | There's a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers," Bea said. "It's that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they're pretty much okay, they've got a force field around them. I don't know if Jonna ever had it. I think she's always known about the bad things." | Maile Meloy | ||
| 0a91a25 | This deranged jungle of ironies coinhabits my skull like feathers and fireworks. My heart fills with stones. I am the mad aunt who laughs her head off at the funeral. There rises in me the most inappropriate hysteria in this most somber of places. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 3ec7fb3 | A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an "Or.. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 485ec4c | How do I stop this misery?" I groaned, scanning the shelves for a cure. "Don't go out there," he said flatly. I contemplated this reasonable observation for about sixteen seconds. Move to town. Hang out at the laundromat. Have eight children. Then I melted back into the pinon-juniper forest." | Ellen Meloy | ||
| c3987e7 | I was a lowly puddle of plasma, trading "I am alive" for a vague "I tend to exist" and weeping for joy over the sheer revelation." | Ellen Meloy | ||
| f82c848 | Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| f27f49c | So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 080dcd6 | It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| a973e07 | This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 28fc875 | You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists' photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 8455a87 | Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories? | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 2b08bc5 | Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to . They want to help . They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything. | librarians librarianship | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 574ebf7 | So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are. They're sorting it all out for us. | archivists librarian librarians librarianship | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 10dcaa2 | Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn't help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder. | library wonder | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 6fb30f8 | ome seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the unive.. | M. John Harrison | ||
| 95cea79 | I would wish to be provided with medication with which to end my life at the time of my choosing. There may be considerable pain that factors into my decision, or it may be that I fear loss of my ability to lead what to my mind is a meaningful life. If I'm unable to feed myself, to toilet myself, to stand or walk on my own, to make rational choices, I want my family to understand that it's time for me to go--that it's my decision for myself.. | Diane Rehm | ||
| d13ddbc | Gdy to koty mialy definiowac swiat, wazne miejsce zajmowalyby w nim pozerane dla zabawy muchy | M. John Harrison | ||
| d8429d6 | Don't you know, Fat Antoyne, that three old men in white caps throw dice for the fate of the universe?' No, Fat Antoyne said, he had never heard that. 'Their names are Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint. | M. John Harrison | ||
| 01f4cae | Outside, a dog sprawls among the empty tables, its body rocking with the evening heat. Someone has given it a hamburger which first it guards, then, eventually, eats. It's some kind of winter dog, a malamute perhaps, a dog of marvellous subtle greys and whites. Also of transparent intelligence, and less transparent motive. The beauty of an animal like this appears to fix it in our expectations. But while its beauty says one thing, its heart.. | dog | M. John Harrison | |
| c8d7d5a | Back then, Manhattan was the infant country | Paul Collins | ||
| febc610 | I been brought up a hatter," he sighed, "people would have come into the world without heads." | Paul Collins | ||
| df41985 | Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow--just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate "two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone." | Paul Collins | ||
| def7022 | So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre. | Paul Collins | ||
| ca29504 | On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death "will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it." | Paul Collins | ||
| 5675752 | At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem "To Annie": Thank Heaven! the crisis-- The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last-- And the Fever called 'Living' Is conquer'd at last." | Paul Collins | ||
| 0faca82 | It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his "prose poem," Eureka. "The Raven" was indeed Poe's most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms--but as art it is distinctly backward-looking." | Paul Collins | ||
| eaec2b0 | New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election--and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race. | Paul Collins | ||
| 83fad2d | If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument," Doyle later mused, "it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids." | Paul Collins |