Michele Roberts Quotes

He who says organization, says oligarchy

The government [...] cannot be anything other than the organization of a minority. It is the aim of this minority to impose upon the rest of society a 'legal order', which is the outcome of the exigencies of dominion and of the exploitation of the mass of helots effected by the ruling minority, and can never be truly representative of the majority.

One who is indispensable has in his power all the lords and masters of the earth.

Organization implies a tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of any kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly. As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed.

Aucun représentant ne peut exactement représenter les besoins d'autrui ; un représentant tend à devenir membre d'une certaine élite et jouit souvent de privilèges qui érodent l'intérêt qu'il doit porter aux revendications de ses mandants. Relayée par les élus du système représentatif, la colère des protestataires perd de sa force ; [...]. Les élus développent une certaine expertise qui tend à sa propre perpétuation. Les représentants passent plus de temps ensemble qu'avec les électeurs qu'ils représentent et forment vite un club fermé respectant ce que Robert Michels appelait "un pacte d'assistance mutuelle" contre le reste de la société.

Who says organisation, says oligarchy.

againbite [agenbite] of inwit. James Joyce revived the expression agenbite [againbite] of inwit in Ulysses. it is a good example of Anglo-Saxon replacements of foreign words, meaning the "remorse of conscience" and originally being the prose translation of a French moral treatise (The Ayenbite of Ynwit) made by Dan Michel in 1340.

The consciousness of power always produces vanity, an undue belief in personal greatness. The desire to dominate, for good or for evil, is universal. These are elementary psychological facts. In the leader, the consciousness of his personal worth, and of the need which the mass feels for guidance, combine to induce in his mind a recognition of his superiority (real or supposed), and awake, in addition, that spirit of command which exists in the germ of every man and woman. We see from this that every human power seeks to enlarge its preogatives. He who has acquired power will almost alwayss endeavour to consolidate it and to extend it, to multiply the ramparts which defend his position, and to withdraw himself from the control of the masses.

Something within each one of us had been awakened that we had not known was there; some dream, desire, or doubt, flickered into life by that same rumor, took root, and flourished. We were none of us the same afterwards. Robert, Michel, François, Edmé, myself, were changed imperceptibly. The rumor, true or false, had brought into the open hopes and dreads which, hitherto concealed, would now be part of our ordinary living selves.

Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed. The Terror, emigration, war, political purges, disgrace after defeat, political suspicion and scapegoating, on top of all the normal cases of resignation and retirement, meant that men like Lazare Hoche, who was a corporal in 1789, could be a general by 1793, or Michel Ney, a lieutenant in 1792, could become one by 1796. Napoleon’s rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day.73 Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.

I've got the kids in my room," she explained, while Jubal strove to keep up with her, "so that Honey Bun can watch them." Jubal was mildly startled to see, a moment later, what Patricia meant by that. The boa was arranged on one of twin double beds in squared-off loops that formed a nest - a twin nest, as one bight of the snake had been pulled across to bisect the square, making two crib-sized pockets, each padded with a baby blanket and each containing a baby. The ophidian nursemaid raised her head inquiringly as they came in. Patty stroked it and said, "It's all right, dear. Father Jubal wants to see them. Pet her a little, and let her grok you, so that she will know you next time." First Jubal coochey-cooed at his favorite girl friend when she gurgled at him and kicked, then petted the snake. He decided that it was the handsomest specimen of Bojdae he had ever seen, as well as the biggest - longer, he estimated, than any other boa constrictor in captivity. Its cross bars were sharply marked and the brighter colors of the tail quite showy. He envied Patty her blue-ribbon pet and regretted that he would not have more time in which to get friendly with it. The snake rubbed her head against his hand like a cat. Patty picked up Abby and said, "Just as I thought. Honey Bun, why didn't you tell me?"- then explained, as she started to change diapers, "She tells me at once if one of them gets tangled up, or needs help, or anything, since she can't do much for them herself - no hands - except nudge them back if they try to crawl out and might fall. But she just can't seem to grok that a wet baby ought to be changed - Honey Bun doesn't see anything wrong about that. And neither does Abby." "I know. We call her 'Old Faithful.' Who's the other cutie pie?" "Huh? That's Fatima Michele, I thought you knew." "Are they here? I thought they were in Beirut!" "Why, I believe they did come from some one of those foreign parts. I don't know just where. Maybe Maryam told me but it wouldn't mean anything to me; I've never been anywhere. Not that it matters; I grok all places are alike - just people. There, do you want to hold Abigail Zenobia while I check Fatima?" Jubal did so and assured her that she was the most beautiful girl in the world, then shortly thereafter assured Fatima of the same thing. He was completely sincere each time and the girls believed him - Jubal had said the same thing on countless occasions starting in the Harding administration, had always meant it and had always been believed. It was a Higher Truth, not bound by mundane logic. Regretfully he left them, after again petting Honey Bun and telling her the same thing, and just as sincerely.

The pattern of vicious circle depicted by the transition between Haile Selassie and Mengistu, or between the British colonial governors of Sierra Leone and Siaka Stevens, is so extreme and at some level so strange that it deserves a special name. As we already mentioned in chapter 4, the German sociologist Robert Michels called it the iron law of oligarchy. The internal logic of oligarchies, and in fact of all hierarchical organizations, is that, argued Michels, they will reproduce themselves not only when the same group is in power, but even when an entirely new group takes control. What Michels did not anticipate perhaps was an echo of Karl Marx’s remark that history repeats itself—the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Pasteur equally as mischief-makers. As late as 1883, Michel Peter, a Parisian physician held in high esteem by his colleagues, went so far as to denounce Pasteur’s work to his face, at an address at the National Academy of Medicine. “What do I care about your microbes? . . . I have said, and I repeat, that all this research on microbes are not worth the time spent on them or the fuss made about them, and that after all the work nothing would be changed in medicine, there would only be a few extra microbes. Medicine . . . is threatened by the invasion of incompetent, and rash persons given to dreaming.” But as the discoveries mounted, these holdouts were increasingly marginalized.

A few years ago Michele Bachmann remarked that if the minimum wage were repealed, “we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” If you accept her logic, why stop there? After all, slavery was a full-employment system.

I felt you might lose something precious by making and telling a story, because then all its parts stretched out, beads strung one by one onto a string in time, tangling along from beginning to end; whereas while the unspoken words remained inside you all of them connected one to the other in a mad circling dance which was indescribably beautiful, wholly present in just one second, an eternal now. When you smoothed and flattened and straightened the story out, made it exist word by word in speech, you lost that heavenly possession of everything at once. You bumped down to earth and told one moment at a time. Speaking and telling, you threw joy away and had to mourn the loss of paradise, the shimmering eternal moment which was outside time… Perhaps Eve’s punishment, thrust forth from paradise, was to become a storyteller." Michele Roberts - 'The Looking Glass

he had cozied up to history’s worst murderers and racists, but he realized sooner than most that the new powers would be the liberators of places like Altaussee. The void of April to May 1945 was a period where past deeds could quickly be buried or mischaracterized, and today’s lie could become tomorrow’s truth. Those who stepped forward, Michel knew, could not only save their own necks, but become invaluable to the Allied conquerors.

History is full of examples of revolutions and radical movements replacing one tranny with another, in a pattern that the German sociologist Robert Michels dubbed the iron law of oligarchy, a particularly pernicious form of the vicious circle.

For example, Gross and Levitt have the kind of “mental imperialism,” as John Michel once called it, which just can’t resist ridiculing all non-Western cultures and their non-Western sciences. They dismiss all alternative healing, especially from the Orient, with a hoity-toity arrogance only equaled by Christian theologians writing about Oriental religions; and this seems especially narrow and provincial in 1995, since the American Medical Association, once a hotbed of that kind of prejudice, has grown increasingly open-minded in the past 20 years and prints more and more studies in their Journal in which researchers investigate alternative therapies scientifically, instead of just dismissing them with racist jokes like Gross and Levitt. (The A.M.A. has even printed studies in which alternative medical theories seem to work (!), although of course this research requires replication before it will become generally accepted.)

Ich glaube, dass Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller so gerne wandern gehen, weil es ein gutes Mittel gegen die dunklen Zustände ist, die einen, ob man es will oder nicht, bei der einsamen Arbeit am Schreibtisch einholen. Nicht selten waren die größten Depressiven der Literaturgeschichte auch die begeistertsten Wandernden. Die Liste der Schreibenden, die mithilfe des Gehens in der Natur ihre Stimmung aufbesserten, ist lang: William und Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Goethe natürlich, Rousseau, Nietzsche und viele mehr. Michel de Montaigne liebte es, ziellos durch die idyllische Landschaft des Périgord zu streifen, anderen Menschen begegnete er eher mit Vorsicht. Für Virginia Woolf, die begabteste Romanautorin, die begabteste Wanderin und leider auch die begabteste Depressive von allen, lag die Rettung in den Hügeln von Sussex und an der Steilküste von Cornwall. »Nach der Einsamkeit des eigenen Zimmers« konnte sie nur beim Wandern das »Ich« abwerfen, wie sie einmal sagte. Ich wusste, was sie meinte. Es ging ihr nicht um Selbstfindung. Wenn man wandert, weil es einem nicht gut geht, will man sich nicht finden, oder zumindest zunächst nicht, erst einmal möchte man vor sich weglaufen.

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism. One such fear was the collapse of community under the corrosive influences of free individualism. Rousseau had already worried about this before the French Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense,” as more and more of them received the right to vote. Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner. Fear of the collapse of community solidarity intensified in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the impact of urban sprawl, industrial conflict, and immigration. Diagnosing the ills of community was a central project in the creation of the new discipline of sociology. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the first French holder of a chair in sociology, diagnosed modern society as afflicted with “anomie”—the purposeless drift of people without social ties—and reflected on the replacement of “organic” solidarity, the ties formed within natural communities of villages, families, and churches, with “mechanical” solidarity, the ties formed by modern propaganda and media such as fascists (and advertisers) would later perfect. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regretted the supplanting of traditional, natural societies (Gemeinschaften) by more differentiated and impersonal modern societies (Gesellschaften) in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), and the Nazis borrowed his term for the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) they wanted to form. The early twentieth-century sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels contributed more directly to fascist ideas.

Michel de Montaigne wrote, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

Wikipedia: Iron law of oligarchy According to [Robert] Michels, all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class", rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members. Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.

There should be no presumption that any critical juncture will lead to a successful political revolution or to change for the better. History is full of examples of revolutions and radical movements replacing one tyranny with another, in a pattern that the German sociologist Robert Michels dubbed the iron law of oligarchy, a particularly pernicious form of the vicious circle.

It was reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that did it. In it, the author explains that there are two types of people: the romantics (the Zen part of the title) and the classics (the motorcycle maintenance part of the title). Romantics are interested in the pleasure of riding a bike, while classics are interested in the pleasure of understanding how the bike works.

A few years ago the Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann remarked that if the minimum wage were repealed, “we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” If you accept her logic, why stop there? After all, slavery was a full-employment system.

During the 72nd Annual Tony Awards-Show, Robert De Niro said : “I’m gonna say one thing. F- Trump.” I say that with such Foes, you don't need Friends.

Duffy and I had been in the back room of Slade’s place waiting for Alex, with whom I had the hope of transacting a little business. I was a newspaperman and Alex knew something I wanted to know. Duffy had called him in, for Duffy was a friend of mine. At least, he knew that I worked for the Chronicle, which at that time was supporting the Joe Harrison outfit. Joe Harrison was Governor then. And Duffy was one of Joe Harrison’s boys. So I was sitting in the back room of Slade’s place, one hot morning in June or July, back in 1922, waiting for Alex Michel to turn up and listening to the silence in the back room of Slade’s place. A funeral parlor at midnight is ear-splitting compared to the effect you get in the middle of the morning in the back room of a place like Slade’s if you are the first man there. You sit there and think how cozy it was last night, with the effluvium of brotherly bodies and the haw-haw of camaraderie, and you look at the floor where now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom left this morning when the unenthusiastic old Negro man cleaned up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone and it is His move. So I sat there in the silence (Duffy was never talkative in the morning before he had worried down two or three drinks), and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the ample flesh of my companion. Alex

I had sent copies of the drawings and most of Bill’s other Titanic materials to my friend, Jean-Louis Michel, the French engineer who was my co-leader on the expedition. Remember, under the deal I’d made with the French, they were going to find Titanic with their powerful new sonar, and I was supposed to come in behind them and photograph the wreckage with my robotic cameras. I’d willingly accepted a secondary role. As it turned out, the French team didn’t even want me there for the first couple weeks of the search. Jean-Louis’s colleagues wanted to find Titanic all by themselves.