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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1f147c9 | Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing chang.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 37e22fe | Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 425c446 | The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 0a49f28 | The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist. | Chris Hedges | ||
| cbe5b79 | motivation of positive | Chris Hedges | ||
| a68c243 | The idiots take over the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 368e46f | The seductive inducements to conformity - money, celebrity, prizes, grants, book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions, and a public platform - are scored by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel down before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the in.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| cd854de | Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural and spiritual. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malig.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 8ecae40 | Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 08342ba | Those who resist are relentlessly self-critical. They ask the hard questions that mass culture, which promises an unachievable eternal youth, fame and financial success, deflects us from asking. What does it mean to be born? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? How do we live a life of meaning? What is justice? What is truth? What is beauty? What does our past say about our present? How do we defy radical evil? | Chris Hedges | ||
| ccc6605 | We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called "sickness unto death" - the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement." | Chris Hedges | ||
| c5047c6 | Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a complete human being. It is about overcoming estrangement. It is about our neighbor. It is about honoring the sacred. It is about dignity. It is about sacrifice. It is about courage. It is about freedom. It is about the capacity to love. Resistance must be become our vocation. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 9ea4c8e | Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to "succeed." The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us t.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| b34b859 | The morning sleeper Has much undone The quick will catch the prize. | James L. Nelson | ||
| e0d2299 | A man should drink in moderation be sensible or silent. Havamal | James L. Nelson | ||
| 61fd535 | Fin Gall - Gaelic term for Vikings of Norwegian descent. It means White Strangers. | James L. Nelson | ||
| b610950 | It was the duty of any man to face his enemies without hesitation. This was a truth that Odd had been taught from the time he was old enough to learn. And he would never do anything less. But facing one's wife was a different matter. That was something he was very hesitant to do. Nor was he afraid to admit as much, and he doubted that any man would be. | James L. Nelson | ||
| 1e9b3bf | Men and their honor and fighting... Such things were fine for them. They had victory or they had death, and with the latter a hope of heaven. They did not think about the women left behind to be raped, the children to be sold into slavery. Men and their damned, damned honor. | James L. Nelson | ||
| a2fd4d2 | The unwise man is awake all night, and ponders everything over; when morning comes he is weary in mind, and all is a burden as ever. Havamal | James L. Nelson | ||
| eb44a8f | not Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, or Sam Giancana; not H. L. Hunt or Clint Murchison; not James Angleton, Bill Harvey, or David Morales; not Curtis LeMay, Charles Willoughby, or John McCloy; not even J. Edgar Hoover; and certainly not Lee Harvey Oswald--had the motive, the means, the opportunity, the demonstrated pattern of previous criminal, even murderous conduct and the overall demented resolve to see it through. Only one man met .. | Phillip F. Nelson | ||
| dada9c7 | When passing a door-post watch as you walk on, inspect as you enter. It is uncertain where enemies lurk or crouch in a dark corner. Havamal | James L. Nelson | ||
| a8e6342 | Be your friend's true friend, to him and his friends, Thorgrim recalled the old saying. Beware of befriending an enemy's friend. | James L. Nelson | ||
| 4e21b0a | I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house. | Rachel Klein | ||
| 18efde2 | Voor iedereen die zich afvraagt of het mogelijk is de puberteit te overleven, is een bevestigend antwoord de enige geruststelling die ik kan geven. | puberteit | Rachel Klein | |
| 3e78a23 | One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 83faa7c | you--die? | Maile Meloy | ||
| 8e5c97c | People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest. | Maile Meloy | ||
| c97877f | They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness. | Maile Meloy | ||
| ce06dd3 | But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations, listed below. Thou shalt not steal unless thou art near death with hunger fighting in a just cause, or hath a family to support, or if perhaps an irresistible opportunity to get rich presenteth itself. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 311cc4d | They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids' adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment... She'd been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn't her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn't she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her a.. | reading life kid judgment hero child childhood | Maile Meloy | |
| ed9d9a2 | It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica'), | Maile Meloy | ||
| b9185af | and braking, | Maile Meloy | ||
| 933b2c4 | He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 9dc1c07 | But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world? | Maile Meloy | ||
| 52fb860 | Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 54bba36 | Benjamin called it "estro-lock," the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness." | Maile Meloy | ||
| 74fde96 | Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default. | Maile Meloy | ||
| c81ecb6 | The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico's flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth's rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise.. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| c68f60d | In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding--maybe a little food--can set the world right. B | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 0269e30 | It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 4dfc413 | Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for.. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 571da04 | One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession," one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "was because I'm in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity.... There's a subversive element to librarianship that I adore." | library service | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 37208e3 | We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata--I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more. | technology | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 718e3d0 | I understood--I thought I understood--then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete. | Marilyn Johnson |