1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
[…]
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
This country… needs… no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a [leader] whose eye reads the heavens, while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous for the use of human implements… a [leader] of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a [leader] who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave
The trailblazing journalist, activist, and literary critic
Margaret Fuller, who laid the foundation for American feminism and who was born on this day in 1810, on
what makes a great leader – wisdom we’d be well advised to heed two centuries later as we head into the next election, of which women are this time a part, both as voters and candidates, largely due to Fuller’s legacy.
It is often very illuminating… to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see?
[…]
You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is itself a protection.
Excerpts from Walter Lippmann’s 1922 classic Public Opinion – a timeless and intensely timely read on the psychology of deception, self-delusion, and the discipline of apprehending reality clearly, as applicable to politics as it is to our personal relations and the social dynamics of any community.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.
All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being.
Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.
The incomparable
Zadie Smith on
optimism and despair – superb read, particularly at this cultural moment.
Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.
We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.
A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.
