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351695c And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before--that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else's dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains--my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner. Ta-Nehisi Coates
bd5fe8e My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers--even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. Ta-Nehisi Coates
8c77b69 The Bank of the United States would enable the government to make good on four powers cited explicitly in the Constitution: the rights to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate trade among states, and support fleets and armies. Ron Chernow
4a0807d An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. Ta-Nehisi Coates
3a36fa1 The idea of racial inferiority was created to justify unequal treatment; belief in racial inferiority is not what triggered unequal treatment. Nor was fear of difference. As Ta-Nehisi Coates states, "But race is the child of racism, not the father."6 He means that first we exploited people for their resources, not according to how they looked. Exploitation came first, and then the ideology of unequal races to justify this exploitation follo.. Robin DiAngelo
0f388fa the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. Ta-Nehisi Coates
d23bb21 what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable. Ta-Nehisi Coates
89c994d To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, .. Ta-Nehisi Coates
327ba79 Educated children never offered excuses--certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. Ta-Nehisi Coates
a86123d I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more. Ta-Nehisi Coates
ebbe13d We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out. Ta-Nehisi Coates
a6a1d89 As I learned the house, and began to read, and began to see more of the Quality, I saw that just as the fields and its workers were the engine of everything, the house itself would have been lost without those who tasked within it. My father, like all the masters, built an entire apparatus to disguise this weakness, to hide how prostrate they truly were. The tunnel, where I first entered the house, was the only entrance that the Tasked were.. Ta-Nehisi Coates
a4bebcd She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation Ta-Nehisi Coates
f96527c She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing--myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? Ta-Nehisi Coates
2bc764f The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private; their names were spat out at banquets, their children mocked in the parlors, their wives and daughters seduced and discarded. They were a degraded and downtrodden nation enduring the boot of the Quality, solely for the right to put a boot of their own to the Tasked. Ta-Nehisi Coates
166df4c Breathing. I just dream of breathing Ta-Nehisi Coates
905423b The spirit and soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible--that is precisely why they are so precious. Ta-Nehisi Coates
1180cb9 On the course of that chariot and those horses. A boy could not hope to control them. You are my son, but mortal. No mortal Could hope to manage those reins. Not even the gods are allowed to touch them. ... 'Our first stretch is almost vertical. Fresh as they are, first thing, It is all the horses can do to get up it. Then on to mid-heaven. Terrifying To look down through nothing At earth and sea, so tiny. My heart nearly struggles out .. Ted Hughes
34afcdf Civil servants should keep out of politics and politics should be kept out of the civil service Alexander Mackenzie
e089879 Heracles' heroic world and Deianeira's warmth and tenderness are mutually exclusive. Sophocles seeks not to vindicate the one against the other, but to dramatize the tragedy of their irreconcilability and their mutual destructiveness. Charles Segal
2a42a1b On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating "to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm . . . To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry." Daniel Pinchbeck
abe6bbd And yet they say there is no God! Alexander Mackenzie
e3669e7 It was a heartbreaking story. He closed his eyes tightly as he told it, so I took the opportunity to quickly check Twitter. I hate not knowing what's happening on Twitter. Jon Ronson
3f1d702 I determined to rule in broad daylight or not at all Alexander Mackenzie
c5296f8 I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor. Man Ray
0e74b53 I think he saw his checklist as something pure--innocent as only science can be--but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions. When Jon Ronson
a71e74c Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering. Alexander Maclaren
019ccdd He said I really had to be careful. Psychopaths are truly dangerous, he said. And they're often the people you least expect them to be. "When" Jon Ronson
fc03aea unconcerned but not indifferent Man Ray
6700990 Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risque thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore. 'I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.' He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something.. normality social-media Jon Ronson
e1a8932 Psychologists try and remind anxiety sufferers that 'what if' worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself thinking, 'What if I just came across as racist?' the 'what if' is evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It's just thoughts swirling frantically around. Jon Ronson
e99fe83 Is Obama satanic?" he asked me. I was grateful for the conversation starter -- I consider anything that staves off social awkwardness to be a blessing -- but I couldn't lie." Jon Ronson
8400694 I love the way you talk. You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They're your personal property and you make them dance for you. Jon Ronson
72d9868 A wronged person is still a wronged person even if they're an unfashionable wronged person. shaming Jon Ronson
086be42 Alex was growing in prominence. I noticed him trending on Twitter from time to time, for telling his now millions of fans that U.S. scientists were covertly creating "man-fish hybrids," that atheists "worship Lucifer," and that the government puts secret chemicals in juice boxes to turn Americans gay: "After you're done drinking your little juices you're ready to put makeup on, wear a short skirt, put together a garden of roses or something.. Jon Ronson
f6fbed6 Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia - photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, etc. 'Well, it's certainly not what I expected when I wrote them,' Christopher said. 'I have to admit, my first reaction was, "Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?" ' I laughed. 'I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called ".. Jon Ronson
3291dd7 the Bush family's proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What Jon Ronson
bdbbef2 They'll be brought great distances," Trump had said. "We're not dropping them right across. They learned that. President Eisenhower. They'd drop them right across, and they'd come back. Then when they flew them to a long distance, all of a sudden that was the end." Here, Trump was praising Operation Wetback -- a 1954 endeavor in which Mexicans were rounded up and dumped in the wilderness, where they were stranded without food or possessions.. Jon Ronson
4d282e1 It felt like a vast left-wing conspiracy to pretend to have found Eric Andre's performance funny. This was everyday life on social media, each side lurching toward mockery and attack -- fanning the flames of the divisive chaos from which Trump, the Twitter candidate, had risen. But Jon Ronson
b61155b Please ejaculate", I silently urged the man, "so I can go to sleep". (In this way I imagine I was like millions of women before me" humour joke sex Jon Ronson
4eea295 Before working with Trump, Manafort had been Yanukovych's election strategist. There was something quite Trump-ish about his former client, not least his $75 million palace -- with its golden chandeliers and Faberge eggs and personalized cognac bottles (the label had a little photograph of Yanukovych), his shiny grand pianos and sweeping gold-trimmed staircases. And then there was his private ostrich zoo. The palace had been constructed in .. Jon Ronson
d03eb97 aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and, Jon Ronson
e29d175 The communist looked very pleased with himself -- for being a communist and for being hit by Alex. It was exasperating. Alex had been within feet of me and I hadn't known it until he'd hit a communist and was bustled away, and it was too late. Jon Ronson
2172b4b These depictions of a broken America were also highly selective. When Ted Cruz listed the various ways Americans "have had their lives destroyed" -- by terrorists, or police officers cut down in the line of duty, he pointedly excluded stories of innocent black people shot by the police." Jon Ronson