Foment Quotes

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If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
Abigail Adams (The Letters of John and Abigail Adams)
...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
Abigail Adams
He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with that comes at once a short of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness.
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
Abigail Adams (My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams)
The common and continual mischief's [sic] of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.
George Washington (Tesoros de lectura, A Spanish/Reading/Language Arts Program, Grade K, Coleccion Un paso mas: Nivel avanzado Beyond level Leveled Readers, Unit 1 Week ... READING TREASURES) (Spanish Edition))
There are many who think a wise prince ought, when he has the chance, to foment astutely some enmity, so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)
-----If you walk like a fascist, talk like a fascist, think the rules do not apply to you; if you seek to destroy the democratic institutions of your nation, solely to serve your own personal ends; if you foment racism, violence, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and racial intolerance; if you constantly lie to the people of your country; if you seek to destroy the credibility of news organizations to inoculate yourself against them reporting to the nation about your crimes; if you knowingly collude with foreign powers to undermine your country’s electoral process; if you sell public policy, domestic and foreign, to the highest bidder…you just might be a fascist.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.
Baruch Spinoza
Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness....What is behind it? Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job.
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment.
Dean Koontz (Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1))
Pero también es cierto que una buena educación sin un entorno que fomente la innovación produce muchos taxistas de sorprendente cultura general, pero poca riqueza personal o nacional.
Andrés Oppenheimer (¡Crear o morir!: La esperanza de Latinomérica y las cinco claves de la innovación (Spanish Edition))
Empathy is a big part of Sparkleponies, because it’s also my belief (as a history and political science major) that societies that don’t practice rational empathy inevitably collapse – either by fomenting conflict from within by oppressing a segment/s of their populace, or seeking conflict from without by taking from others and eventually getting into a fight they can’t win.
Chris Kluwe
The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately. It would be exceedingly easy to set the country all by the ears and foment hatreds and jealousies, which, by destroying faith and confidence, would help nobody and harm everybody. The end would be the destruction of all progress.
Calvin Coolidge (Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge)
If a person fights the clear evidence of his senses he will never be able to share in genuine tranquillity.”41 In other words, a person who doubts his senses will either lose contact with the reality of the surrounding world, like the Skeptics, and become psychologically isolated and insecure, or he will fall prey, as do the religionists, to theological explanations which do not allay anxiety but foment it.
Epicurus (Lettera sulla felicità)
I was trying to foment a little dissension.' He paused. 'No, that's too flippant. How about trying to make the system less warlike—injecting a little love?' He snorted. 'Through violence, of course, like all religious reformers.
L.E. Modesitt Jr. (The Parafaith War (Parafaith, #1))
Don't whine about your poverty and brainless labor. You can read, can't you? Get thee to a library and foment rebellion - in both inner and outer worlds.
Bill Holm (The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth)
Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror. The
Amartya Sen (Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny)
Tedium and boredom are related, but not identical. Tedium comes from a person lacking an ideology to live by; the dulling fear fomented in the soul after confronting the paucity of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
If the Soviet Union and its allies were allowed to continue subverting democracy with terrorism and fomenting so-called “wars of national liberation” in Central America, it wouldn’t stop there: It would spread into the continent of South America and north to Mexico. Then, as I was told that Lenin once said: “Once we have Latin America, we won’t have to take the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, because it will fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit. . .
Ronald Reagan (An American Life: The Autobiography)
if we are going to be genuinely Christlike, we will not be conformists! For one, our Lord can hardly be called a conformist. He disturbed the status quo, railed against injustice and lack of mercy, hung out with highly questionable people, and fomented a revolution that called for the overthrow of religious oppression.
Alan Hirsch (Untamed (Shapevine): Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship)
Jesus from the moment he first appears in Galilee is a sign of contradiction, fomenting revolution through telling the truth about the state of the world, the reality of evil, and the eye of God, who judges in a different vein altogether than courts of law, whether they be religious canons, the ecclesiastical courts, or government legal systems.
Megan McKenna (The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture)
No one wants to occupy a black hole of sadness and despair or slip on the tight rope that separates sanity from insanity, and reside in a vortex devoid of reality. I entered the world as a freeman and desire to escape a state of existential vertigo. I yearn to discover a synthesizing spirit of my being and hold my head high, free of doubt, and devoid of fear. I wish to foment the cerebral energy to stave off premature destruction and forevermore blunt an intolerable state of anguish.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.
Edmund Burke (Speech on Conciliation with America)
Jonesy is in his third-floor John Jay College office, looking out at his little slice of Boston and thinking how wrong T. S. Eliot had been to call April the cruelest month just because an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth supposedly got himself crucified then for fomenting rebellion. Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit.
Stephen King (Dreamcatcher)
Because of these divisions in the human population, anyone interested in recent human evolution is almost inevitably studying human races, whether they wish to or not. Scientific inquiry thus runs into potential conflict with the public policy interest of not generating possibly invidious comparisons that might foment racism.
Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
For an intelligence service, there is no process more painful and debilitating than an internal hunt for an unidentified traitor. The damage Philby did to MI6’s self-confidence was far greater and more enduring than anything he inflicted by spying for the KGB. A mole does not just foment mistrust. Like a heretic, he undermines the coherence of faith itself.
Ben Macintyre (The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War)
Les dictatures fomentent l'oppression, la servilité et la cruauté; mais le plus abominable est qu'elles fomentent l'idiotie.
Jorege Luis Borges
They’ve worked the absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely truth since the beginning of time. They foment destruction and chaos. It puts them in their happy place.
Nina Bangs (Eternal Pleasure (Gods of the Night #1))
10 The empty man in arrogance foments strife, but with those who take counsel is wisdom. 11 Wealth can be less than mere breath, but who gathers bit by bit makes it grow.
Robert Alter (The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary)
frenetic intemperance—a restless and reckless spirit inside modern economy that foments a drive to throw off legitimate restraints and gratify disordered passions.
John Horvat (Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society)
Revolutions are born in the hearts of the disillusioned and disenfranchised, but they are fomented through the discourse of public opinion.
H. Peter Alesso (Lieutenant Henry Gallant (The Henry Gallant Saga, #2))
the question for us as a society is whether we participate in any way in the corruption of the defenseless, the undereducated, and the poor in spirit. We may not be able to stop the violence of others, but we can stop our own. A child is born in innocence, and this violence does not emerge out of thin air. It is created, fomented, and nurtured in them to their detriment.
John Lewis (Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change)
But we could no longer bear the discrimination of a government dominated by the majority Sinhalese, the Tamil politicians declared: no more second-class status for our language, double standards and quotas for Tamil students, government-run Sinhala colonization schemes in traditionally Tamil areas, no more government-fomented anti-Tamil violence. The 1958 riots had taken place ten
V.V. Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night)
Using blacks as strikebreakers had an added benefit for employers—it fomented racism, which fostered deeply entrenched divisions among the working classes and further weakened the labor movement.
David Williams (A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (New Press People's History))
Still, there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness.
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call “the sixties.
Tom Robbins (Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life)
They came to believe their doctors were holding back limited quantities of a cure, and attempted to take them hostage. They formed armies, congresses, religions; plotted rebellions, fomented treasons, practiced heresies.
Joe Hill (The Fireman)
I was once, I remember, called to a patient who had received a violent contusion in his tibia, by which the exterior cutis was lacerated, so that there was a profuse sanguinary discharge; and the interior membranes were so divellicated, that the os or bone very plainly appeared through the aperture of the vulnus or wound. Some febrile symptoms intervening at the same time (for the pulse was exuberant and indicated much phlebotomy), I apprehended an immediate mortification. To prevent which, I presently made a large orifice in the vein of the left arm, whence I drew twenty ounces of blood; which I expected to have found extremely sizy and glutinous, or indeed coagulated, as it is in pleuretic complaints; but, to my surprize, it appeared rosy and florid, and its consistency differed little from the blood of those in perfect health. I then applied a fomentation to the part, which highly answered the intention;
Henry Fielding (History of Tom Jones, a Foundling)
The universities are an absolute wreck right now, because for decades, any graduate student in the humanities who had independent thinking was driven out. There was no way to survive without memorizing all these stupid bromides with this referential bowing to these over-inflated figures like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Basically, it's been a tyranny in the humanities, because the professors who are now my age – who are the baby boomer professors, who made their careers on the back of Foucault and so on – are determined that that survive. So you have a kind of vampirism going on. So I've been getting letters for 25 years since Sexual Personae was released in 1990, from refugees from the graduate schools. It's been a terrible loss. One of my favorite letters was early on: a woman wrote to me, she was painting houses in St. Louis, she said that she had wanted a career as a literature professor and had gone into the graduate program in comparative literature at Berkeley. And finally, she was forced to drop out because, she said, every time she would express enthusiasm for a work they were studying in the seminar, everyone would look at her as if she had in some way created a terrible error of taste. I thought, 'Oh my God', see that's what's been going on – a pretentious style of superiority to the text. [When asked what can change this]: Rebellion! Rebellion by the grad students. This is what I'm trying to foment. We absolutely need someone to stand up and start criticizing authority figures. But no; this generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school and high school and college to be subservient to authority.
Camille Paglia
an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
John Adams (The Letters of John and Abigail Adams)
The shakedown of Switzerland and Germany has been only a prelude to the grand finale: the shakedown of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, alluring prospects opened up in the former heartland of European Jewry. Cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of “needy Holocaust victims,” the Holocaust industry has sought to extort billions of dollars from these already impoverished countries. Pursuing this end with reckless and ruthless abandon, it has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Norman G. Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering)
One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally rank among the best organized and most coherent groupings in society. They constitute ready-made organizations - social-based NGOs, if you will - for maintaining Islamic culture and practices under periods of extreme oppression and for fomenting resistance and guerrilla warfare against foreign occupation. The history of Sufi participation in dozens of liberation struggles is long and widespread across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Sufi groups were prominent in the anti-Soviet resistance, and later against the American in Afghanistan and against US occupation forces in Iraq.
Graham E. Fuller
For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty’s dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’ And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels)
And I maintain, Detective Halse,” said Inspector Fry doggedly, “that the civil unrest which allowing this message to remain in view would foment is against the principles of conscience and of British decency. Are you against the principles of British decency, Detective?
Lyndsay Faye (Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson)
One of the greatest obstacles to such a synthesis is sectarianism, which is always right and displays no tolerance, picking and fomenting quarrels for the holiest of reasons in order to set itself up in the place of religion and brand anyone who thinks differently as a lost sheep, if nothing worse. But have any human beings the right to totalitarian claims? This claim, certainly, is so morally dangerous that we would do better to leave its fulfilment to Almighty God rather than presume to be little gods ourselves at the expense of our fellow-men.
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
As if to underscore the seriousness of her charge, Abigail, only partially in jest, went on to assert: “If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.
Walter R. Borneman (American Spring: Lexington, Concord, and the Road to Revolution)
The face that Moses had begged to see – was forbidden to see – was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19-20) The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his brow… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on – he grants the warrior’s continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how he and the Father first designed the medial nerve of the human forearm – the sensations it would be capable of. The design proves flawless – the nerves perform exquisitely. “Up you go!” They lift the cross. God is on display in his underwear and can scarcely breathe. But these pains are a mere warm-up to his other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around his nose, but his heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being – the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father’s eye turns brown with rot. His Father! He must face his Father like this! From heaven the Father now rouses himself like a lion disturbed, shakes His mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross.Never has the Son seen the Father look at him so, never felt even the least of his hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The Son does not recognize these eyes. “Son of Man! Why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped – murdered, envied, hated, lied. You have cursed, robbed, over-spent, overeaten – fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh the duties you have shirked, the children you have abandoned! Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played the coward, so belittled my name? Have you ever held a razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk – you, who moles young boys, peddle killer drugs, travel in cliques, and mock your parents. Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, foment revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end! Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp – buying politicians, practicing exhortation, filming pornography, accepting bribes. You have burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded in slaves – relishing each morsel and bragging about it all. I hate, loathe these things in you! Disgust for everything about you consumes me! Can you not feel my wrath? Of course the Son is innocent He is blamelessness itself. The Father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place. Jesus will be treated as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed. The Father watches as his heart’s treasure, the mirror image of himself, sinks drowning into raw, liquid sin. Jehovah’s stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction. “Father! Father! Why have you forsaken me?!” But heaven stops its ears. The Son stares up at the One who cannot, who will not, reach down or reply. The Trinity had planned it. The Son had endured it. The Spirit enabled Him. The Father rejected the Son whom He loved. Jesus, the God-man from Nazareth, perished. The Father accepted His sacrifice for sin and was satisfied. The Rescue was accomplished.
Joni Eareckson Tada (When God Weeps Kit: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty)
I want us to ask who benefits from our hopelessness, and to deny our oppressors the satisfaction of getting to see our pain. I want them to wonder how we foment such consistent and deep solidarity and unlearning. I want our infiltrators to be astounded into their own transformations, having failed to tear us apart.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (Emergent Strategy Series, 3))
So maybe Third World discontent is fomented not merely by poverty, disease, corruption and political oppression but also by mere exposure to First World standards. The average Egyptian was far less likely to die from starvation, plague or violence under Hosni Mubarak than under Ramses II or Cleopatra. Never had the material condition of most Egyptians been so good. You’d think they would have been dancing in the streets in 2011, thanking Allah for their good fortune. Instead they rose up furiously to overthrow Mubarak. They weren’t comparing themselves to their ancestors under the pharaohs, but rather to their contemporaries in the affluent West.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
And yet rather than accommodate and moderate student curiosity, for what was after all the best belles lettres and modern science, the theologians responded with interdiction and persecution, as if they had something to fear. In other words, it was less the circle than the seminary itself that was fomenting radicalism, albeit unwittingly.
Stephen Kotkin (Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928)
The principle that every people, insofar as it is possible, must be allowed to live as they want is not based on any notions of cultural relativism, in which all ways of doing things are viewed as being of equal value for all peoples, everywhere. It is, instead, strictly pragmatic: war and revolutions are without exception worse than the alternative, which is simply to leave the development of each society to the people who are actually living there. For this reason we should not wage wars or foment revolutions and otherwise subvert the established orders in others’ lands. In return for this direct opposition to intervention and violence against cultures and peoples, we demand the same for ourselves. Mass immigration to Europe must cease.
Daniel Friberg (The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition)
When feminist impulses are recorded, they are, almost always, the writings of privileged women who had some status from which to speak freely, more opportunity to write and have their writings recorded. Abigail Adams, even before the Declaration of Independence, in March of 1776, wrote to her husband: . . . in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
Truth Is a Lonely Warrior contends that Satan influences global events, and that among his instruments is a powerful organization of men on Earth. This organization has fomented many wars, revolutions and other cataclysms of the past several centuries. Their ultimate goal: establish a world government run by Satan’s puppet – a figure the Bible calls “the beast” or “Antichrist.
James Perloff (Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: Unmasking the Forces behind Global Destruction)
The Internet has become the great comforter and seems to offer it all: news, knowledge, music, entertainment, shopping, relationships, and even sex. But over time, it foments envy and division, confuses our needs and priorities, desensitizes us to violence and suffering, and, by creating a false sense of connectedness, entrenches superficial relationships at the cost of living ones.
Neel Burton (Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions)
  Least total darkness should by Night regaine   Her old possession, and extinguish life   In Nature and all things, which these soft fires   Not only enlighten, but with kindly heate   Of various influence foment and warme,   Temper or nourish, or in part shed down   Thir stellar vertue on all kinds that grow   On Earth, made hereby apter to receive   Perfection from the Suns more potent Ray.
John Milton (Paradise Lost)
Faith has become flesh and blood. That is why, popular piety is a great patrimony of the Church.’ But he warned: ‘It cannot be denied, however, that certain deviated forms exist of popular religiosity that, far from fomenting an active participation in the Church, create instead confusion and can foster a merely exterior religious practice detached from a well-rooted and interior living faith.
Paul Vallely (Pope Francis: Untying the Knots)
Still, there's no denying that in some sense I "feel better," and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness. I've read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure H. wouldn't approve of it. She'd tell me not to be a fool. So I'm pretty certain, would God. What is behind it?
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites.
John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me)
Simply put, the emphasis was therefore on maintaining a society of farmers and lumberjacks, with a small cadre of lawyers, priests, doctors, and politicians to oversee it. Money and business were left to les Anglais. This situation grew untenable, of course, by the mid-twentieth century, and a number of thinkers, artists, and writers (of whom my father was one) fomented the Quiet Revolution, making education, urbanization, and secularism key pillars of modern Quebec.
Justin Trudeau (Common Ground)
My favourite mentor brother told me that there were three kinds of people: followers, leaders and scouts. Scouts are capeable of leadership, but they could not tolerate the responsibility of it. Disinclined to take orders either, they invariably flouted authority and fomented strife. This is why scouts, he said wryly, were the first to be sent into danger, It was half hoped they would be killed. 'I fear you are destined to trouble us as a scout, little sister' he said
Isobelle Carmody (Green Monkey Dreams)
While Paine was endeavoring to make the movement in France peaceful, Burke fomented the league of monarchs against France which maddened its people, and brought on the Reign of Terror. While Paine was endeavoring to preserve the French throne ("phantom” though he believed it), to prevent bloodshed, Burke was secretly writing to the Queen of France, entreating her not to compromise, and to “trust to the support of foreign armies” ("Histoire de France depuis 1789.” Henri Martin, i., 151).
Thomas Paine (Rights of Man)
Many groups use the media and successfully manipulate what Theodor Adorno calls our psychological frailty. This psychological frailty correlates to anxiety. It also precedes and foments fascism, sexism, and racism. Because of our sense of free will, day-to-day anxiety can creep in as a form of guilt or the desire to belong / be loved. It is this frailty that is manipulated which may later be expressed in fascism, nationalism, sexism, racism. It's based on superego storytelling. But what's going on concurrent with all this is a shift from storytelling to storymaking. There's an entire subgroup, mostly the younger generations, that have been participating in gaming and social media in a way that will bring about a new synergy. This is Hegel's dialect approach to society. Jane McGonigal talks about this in her book Reality is Broken, Cathy Davis talks about this in her book Now You See It, Clay Shirky talks about this in his books Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody. Tapscott talks about this in his book Wikinomics.
Chester Elijah Branch (Lecture Notes)
Washington’s Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
Washington's Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged, "your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty." Parties, he warned, were the "worst enemy" of every government, agitating "the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms," kindling "the animosity of one part against another," and even fomenting "riot and insurrection". As to the size of the Republic, "Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it." The American experiment must go on. But it could only thrive if the citizens were supported by religion and morality, and if they were well educated. "Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge," he urged. "In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that the public opinion should be enlightened.
Jill Lepore (These Truths : A History of the United States)
It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always baseless fantasy. The a contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion - really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively. (page 143)
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
For most Americans, the election of the first African-American president was a milestone in correcting a 350-year-old crime. It was a cleansing moment, and a sign of hope for the future. But for others it was a moment of fear, and Republicans played on that for 7 years, insidiously fomenting anger, mistrust, and outright hatred. Now, they bemoan the loss of their party. Well, tough shit. You cynically picked the scab of racism until the wound opened and the pus called Trump oozed out. You birthed this monstrous idiot. You deal with him. These
Ian Gurvitz (WELCOME TO DUMBFUCKISTAN: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America)
Man's greatest fault is to buttress his vices with doctrines that, once elaborated, serve to legitimize his conduct; everything that would be condemned in the heart of another will be forever engraved in his own. That's why a young man's wrongdoings are insignificant: he betrays principles but returns to them. An older man sins only after reflection; his faults emanate from his philosophy, which foments and nourishes them by erecting principles on the debris of his childish morality. And in these inflexible so-called principles he discovers the laws of his depravity.
Marquis de Sade (Aline et Valcour)
This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
Il n'existe pas une Histoire, entité mystérieuse écrite avec un h majuscule. Ce sont les hommes, tant qu'ils sont vraiment des hommes, qui font et défont l'histoire; l'historicisme est plus ou moins la même chose que ce que, dans les milieu de gauche, on appelle le progressisme et il ne veut, aujourd'hui, qu'une chose : fomenter la passivité face au courant qui grossit et nous mène toujours plus bas. Et, taxé de réactionnaires, vous leur répondez : Vous voudriez que pendant que vous agissez, détruisez et profanez, nous ne réagissions pas mais restions à regarder et même vous voudriez nous voire dire : Bravo, continuez ?
Julius Evola (Orientamenti: undici punti)
Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
The third method of dealing with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That question is too complicated to grasp. It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always a baseless fantasy. The contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one—including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons, and the Elders of Zion—really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
The Capitalist Class knows that what brings on the increased supply is not immigration so much, but the improved and ever improving machinery, held as private property. For every immigrant by whom the labor market is overstocked, it is overstocked by ten workingmen in the country whom privately owned machinery displaces. The Capitalist Class is full well aware that if this fact be known the conclusion would leap to sight ; to wit, that the solution oi" the Labor Problem is simply the public ownership of the machine. If fifty men, working ten hours a day, can, with improved machinery, produce as much as one hundred did before without such improved machinery, the publicly owned machine would not, as the privately owned machine does, throw out fifty men; it would throw out five of the former ten hours of work. It is clear as day to the Capitalist Class that it must raise dust over this fact so as to conceal it; and no better means to this end is offered than the fomenting of the plausible delusion that the evil lies in immigration. Anti-immigration laws are the fruit of these two purpose. Such laws kill two flies with one slap ; they draw attention away from the nerve that aches, and simultaneously they help to set the workers of the land in racial and creed hostility against the newcomers, who, of course, the Capitalist Class itself sees to shall not be lacking. Obviously, it is in the interest of the Working Class that this brace of fatal delusions be dispelled from their minds. What does the Labor Leader do? He helps nurse both delusions.
Danie DeLeon
After analyzing our current crisis and studying well-established historical precedents, I must conclude that the global bankers have only three possible cards left to play. The first is admitting culpability and working to restore the American economic engine to its free-market potential. History has taught us that the ruling class rarely admits error and never concedes power. The second is to foment so much civil unrest and fear that the general population will be clamoring for a global dictator who will provide them food, shelter, and security in exchange for their individual freedom and sovereignty. I see the emerging militancy of the labor union movement playing right into this scenario. The final play is global conflict where they can try and control the outcome by means of funding both sides.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
They eyed with mounting alarm the red flags and banners and portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Largo Caballero on huge placards, and listened to the chanting of the demonstrators, demanding the formation of a proletarian government and a people’s army. But it was not just these obvious political symbols that frightened them. The workers in the street had a new confidence or, in their view, insolence. Beggars had started to ask for alms, not for the love of God, but in the name of revolutionary solidarity. Girls walked freely and started to ridicule convention. On 4 May José Antonio delivered a diatribe from prison against the Popular Front. He claimed that it was directed by Moscow, fomented prostitution and undermined the family. ‘Have you not heard the cry of Spanish girls today: “Children, yes! Husbands, no!”?
Antony Beevor (The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939)
4. Aprende a distinguir el ego positivo del negativo mientras buscas tu voz interior. El ego malo perturba, nubla, bloquea y anula; pero el bueno mueve montañas desde la bondad y el amor. Cierra los ojos y pregúntate cómo administras tu ego. Cuántas veces has hecho uso de virtudes o habilidades para imponerte a los demás en el diálogo. Pregúntate si queda espacio en ti para ser tolerante con los otros, aunque no compartas sus opiniones o disfrutes mayor estatus social. 5. Hay demasiados seres humanos frustrados, porque su voz fue apabullada, mutilada y asfixiada durante la infancia. Procura evitarles este trauma a los niños de tu entorno. Ayúdales a buscar tempranamente el equilibrio de la autoestima. No fomentes exclusividades, ni altanería social. Compartir lo que se tiene, expresar los sentimientos y educar en la convivencia es un buen camino.
Ismael Cala (CALA Contigo: El poder de escuchar (Spanish Edition))
Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of the Front National go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I feel I want to quit this constant ageing of mind and body, with incessant argument and nicety concerning ancient decaying things, and to feel the joy of a free and vigorous life; to have, ⎯ be they good or bad, ⎯ broad, unhesitating, unfettered ideas and aspirations, free from everlasting friction between custom and sense, sense and desire, desire and action. If only I could set utterly and boundlessly free this hampered life of mine, I would storm the four quarters and raise wave upon wave of tumult all round; I would career away madly, like a wild horse, for very joy of my own speed! But I am a Bengali, not a Bedouin! I go on sitting in my corner, and mope and worry and argue. I turn my mind now this way up, now the other ⎯ as a fish is fried ⎯ and the boiling oil blisters first this side, then that. Let it pass. Since I cannot be thoroughly wild, it is but proper that I should make an endeavour to be thoroughly civil. Why foment a quarrel between the two?
Rabindranath Tagore (Glimpses of Bengal)
Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.
Andrew G. McCabe (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump)
a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
Here we may observe and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union, so much kept and so far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel and to the course they were in before.
Daniel Defoe (A Journal of the Plague Year: (Classic Illustrated Edition))
The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?
Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
Just as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement "Property is theft" is usually misunderstood, so it is easy to misunderstand Benjamin Tucker's claim that individualist anarchism was part of "socialism." Yet before Marxists monopolized the term, socialism was a broad concept, as indeed Marx's critique of the "unscientific" varieties of socialism in the Communist Manifesto indicated. Thus, when Tucker claimed that the individualist anarchism advocated in the pages of Liberty was socialist, he was not engaged in obfuscation or rhetorical bravado. He (and most of his writers and readers) understood socialism to mean a set of theories and demands that proposed to solve the "labor problem" through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem varied (e.g., poverty, exploitation, lack of opportunity), as did explanations of its causes (e.g., wage employment, monopolies, lack of access to land or credit), and, consequently, so did the proposed solutions (e.g., abolition of private property, regulation, abolition, or state ownership of monopolies, producer cooperation, etc.). Of course, this led to a variety of strategies as well: forming socialist or labor parties, fomenting revolution, building unions or cooperatives, establishing communes or colonies, etc. This dazzling variety led to considerable public confusion about socialism, and even considerable fuzziness among its advocates and promoters.
Frank H Brooks (The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908)
Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but it’s about time we coined it. Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’ Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous, they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, “I do not ask how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is sick or who is sound;” and so they ran desperately into any place or any company. As it brought the people into publick company, so it was surprizing how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They enquired no more into who, they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in, but looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together, as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they shewed in coming, and the earnestness and affection they shewed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last. Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away all manner of prejudice or of scruple about the person who they found in the pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among others, in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had courage enough to stand it, but removed into the country as they found means for escape. As then some parish churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the people made no scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few years before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the churches; nor did the church ministers in that case make any difficulty of accepting their assistance; so that many of those who they called silenced ministers had their mouths opened on the occasion and preached publickly to the people. Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it, that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches, and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel, and to the course they were in before.
Daniel Defoe (A Journal of the Plague Year)
The tactical situation seems simple enough. Thanks to Marx’s prophecy, the Communists knew for certain that misery must soon increase. They also knew that the party could not win the confidence of the workers without fighting for them, and with them, for an improvement of their lot. These two fundamental assumptions clearly determined the principles of their general tactics. Make the workers demand their share, back them up in every particular episode in their unceasing fight for bread and shelter. Fight with them tenaciously for the fulfilment of their practical demands, whether economic or political. Thus you will win their confidence. At the same time, the workers will learn that it is impossible for them to better their lot by these petty fights, and that nothing short of a wholesale revolution can bring about an improvement. For all these petty fights are bound to be unsuccessful; we know from Marx that the capitalists simply cannot continue to compromise and that, ultimately, misery must increase. Accordingly, the only result—but a valuable one—of the workers’ daily fight against their oppressors is an increase in their class consciousness; it is that feeling of unity which can be won only in battle, together with a desperate knowledge that only revolution can help them in their misery. When this stage is reached, then the hour has struck for the final show-down. This is the theory and the Communists acted accordingly. At first they support the workers in their fight to improve their lot. But, contrary to all expectations and prophecies, the fight is successful. The demands are granted. Obviously, the reason is that they had been too modest. Therefore one must demand more. But the demands are granted again44. And as misery decreases, the workers become less embittered, more ready to bargain for wages than to plot for revolution. Now the Communists find that their policy must be reversed. Something must be done to bring the law of increasing misery into operation. For instance, colonial unrest must be stirred up (even where there is no chance of a successful revolution), and with the general purpose of counteracting the bourgeoisification of the workers, a policy fomenting catastrophes of all sorts must be adopted. But this new policy destroys the confidence of the workers. The Communists lose their members, with the exception of those who are inexperienced in real political fights. They lose exactly those whom they describe as the ‘vanguard of the working class’; their tacitly implied principle: ‘The worse things are, the better they are, since misery must precipitate revolution’, makes the workers suspicious—the better the application of this principle, the worse are the suspicions entertained by the workers. For they are realists; to obtain their confidence, one must work to improve their lot. Thus the policy must be reversed again: one is forced to fight for the immediate betterment of the workers’ lot and to hope at the same time for the opposite. With this, the ‘inner contradictions’ of the theory produce the last stage of confusion. It is the stage when it is hard to know who is the traitor, since treachery may be faithfulness and faithfulness treachery. It is the stage when those who followed the party not simply because it appeared to them (rightly, I am afraid) as the only vigorous movement with humanitarian ends, but especially because it was a movement based on a scientific theory, must either leave it, or sacrifice their intellectual integrity; for they must now learn to believe blindly in some authority. Ultimately, they must become mystics—hostile to reasonable argument. It seems that it is not only capitalism which is labouring under inner contradictions that threaten to bring about its downfall …
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
Speech to the Reichstag April 26, 1942 The British Jew, Lord Disraeli, once said that the race problem is the key to the history of the world. We National Socialists have become great in this knowledge. By devoting our attention to the existence of the race problem, we have found the solution for many problems which would have otherwise have seemed incomprehensible. The hidden forces which incited England already in 1914, in the first world war, were Jews. The force which paralyzed us at that time and finally forced us to surrender with the slogan that Germany was no longer able to bear homeward a victorious flag, came from the Jews. It was the Jews who fomented the revolution among our people and thus robbed us of every possibility at further resistance. Since 1939 the Jews have maneuvered the British Empire into the most perilous crisis it has ever known. The Jews were the carriers of that Bolshevist infection which once threatened to destroy Europe. It was also they who incited the ranks of the plutocracies to war, and it is the Jews who have driven America to war against all her own interests, simply and solely from the Jewish capitalistic point of view. And President Roosevelt, lacking ability himself, lends an ear to his brain trust, whose leading men I do not need to mention by name; they are Jews, nothing but Jews. And once again, as in the year 1915, she (America) will be incited by a Jewish President and his completely Jewish entourage to go to war without any reason or sense whatever, with nations which have never done anything to America, and with people from whom America can never win anything. For what is the sense of a war waged by a state having territory without people against people without territory. In the terms of the war it is no longer a question of the interests of individual nations; it is, rather, a question of conflict between nations which want to make the lives of their people secure on this earth, and nations which have become the helpless tools of an international world parasite. The German soldiers and the allies have had an opportunity to witness at first hand the actual work of this Jewish International-war mongers in that country in which Jewish dictatorship has exclusive power and in which it is being taught as the most ideal form of government in the world for future generations and to which low subjects of other nations have become inexplicably subservient just as this was the case with us at one time. And at this juncture this seemingly senile Europe has, as always in the course of its history, raised aloft the torch of its perception and today the men of Europe are marching as the representatives of a new and better order as the genuine youth of social and national liberty throughout the world. Gentlemen! In the course of this winter a decision has been reached in international struggle which as regards to problems involved far exceeds in scope those difficulties which must and can be solved in normal warfare; when in November 1918 the German nation being befogged by the hypocritical phraseology of the American President at that time, Wilson, laid down its arms, although undefeated, and withdrew from the field of battle it was acting under the influence of that Jewish race which hoped to succeed in establishing a secure bulwark of Bolshevism in the very heart of Europe. We know the theoretical principles and the cruel truth regarding the aims of this world-wide pestilence. It is called, "the Rule of the Proletariat," and it really is "Jewish Dictatorship," the extermination of national government and of the intelligent element among the nations, and the rule over the proletariat after it has thus deprived of its leaders and through its own fault ended defenseless by the concerted efforts of Jewish international criminals.
Adolf Hitler
Along with the booming economy, which after 1962 seemed capable of almost anything, the magnified mystique of the presidency stimulated ever-greater expectations among liberals and others who imagined that government possessed big answers to big problems. The revolution of popular expectations, a central dynamic of the 1960s, owed a good deal of its strength to the glorification of presidential activism that Kennedy successfully sought to foment.
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within the material world is for some people so exotic as to be inconceivable. Yet nothing should be more fundamentally clear, as students of
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare)
I draw attention to a kind of politics in which people do not focus their blame on elite decision makers as they try to comprehend an economic recession. Instead, they give their attention to fellow residents who they think are eating their share of the pie. These interpretations are encouraged, perhaps fomented, by political leaders who exploit these divisions for political gain.
Katherine J. Cramer (The Politics of Resentment)
Defected Russian Intelligence officers have revealed that World War II was fomented and used by the Russian leaders as an important part of the long-range strategy for the expansion of World Communism.
W. Cleon Skousen (The Naked Communist: Exposing Communism and Restoring Freedom (The Naked Series Book 1))
Such hysteria was fomented, Wright noted, by appeals to poor whites for whom color was everything since they had nothing else.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Magellan’s sudden identification of millions of land forms fomented a crisis in nomenclature. The International Astronomical Union responded with an all-female naming scheme that evoked a goddess or giantess from every heritage and era, along with heroines real or invented. Thus the Venusian highlands, the counterparts to Earth’s continents, took the names of love goddesses — Aphrodite Terra, Ishtar Terra, Lada Terra, with hundreds of their hills and dales christened for fertility goddesses and sea goddesses. Large craters commemorate notable women (including American astronomer Maria Mitchell, who photographed the 1882 transit of Venus from the Vassar College Observatory), while small craters bear common first names for girls. Venus’s scarps hail seven goddesses of the hearth, small hills the goddesses of the sea, ridges the goddesses of the sky, and so on across low plains named from myth and legend for the likes of Helen and Guinevere, down canyons called after Moon goddesses and huntresses.
Dava Sobel (The Planets)
Wars were full of valour, coming of courage, fomenting of rage and the anticipation of victory. The soldiers were content with what they had spoiled, but it had made my mind run wild in the battles I had escaped. How could I ever obliterate such memories? Such things were hard to forget.
Naveed Qazi (The Trader of War Stories)
As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.
Scott Anderson (Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East)
On another occasion, Alinsky was working in his home base of Chicago to force Chicago’s department stores to give jobs to black activists who were Alinsky’s cronies. On this issue of course Alinsky was competing—or working in tandem, however we choose to view it—with Chicago’s number one racial shakedown man, Jesse Jackson. Jackson mastered a simple strategy of converting race into a protection racket. He would offer to “protect” Chicago businesses from accusations of racism—accusations that the businesses knew were actually fomented by Jackson himself. The businesses would then pay Jackson to make the trouble go away, and also to chase away other potential troublemakers. In return for his efforts, Jackson would typically receive hundreds of thousands in annual donations from the company, plus jobs and minority contracts that would go through his network, and finally other goodies such as free flights on the corporate airplane, supposedly for his “charitable work.” Later Jackson would go national with this blackmail approach. In New York, for example, Jackson opened an office on Wall Street where he extracted millions of dollars in money and patronage from several leading investment houses including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber, and Prudential Securities. On the national stage, another race hustler, Al Sharpton, joined Jackson. For two decades these shakedown men in clerical garb successfully prosecuted their hustles. Jackson was the leader at first, but eventually Sharpton proved more successful than Jackson. While Jackson’s star has faded, Sharpton became President Obama’s chief advisor on race issues.
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)