Private Relay Quotes

Every newspaper report of Virginia’s action made events in Virginia sound more extravagant than they were. The Burgesses had passed four resolves; Maryland printed six and Rhode Island seven; undoubtedly stories relayed in private letters, by word of mouth, the gossip of taverns, parishes, towns, and court meetings introduced further distortions. Henry’s bravado was reported in these stories; his backing down was not.

There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

Recently I met with the director of the London Ironstone railway," he said. For Kathleen's benefit, he explained, "It's a private company, owned by a friend. Tom Severin." 'We're in the same London club," West added. Devon viewed the map critically before drawing a parallel line. "Severin wants to reduce distance on London Ironstone's existing Portsmouth route. He's also planning to relay the entire sixty-mile line, start to finish, with heavier rails to accommodate faster trains." "Can he afford such a project?" West asked. "He's already secured one million pounds." West uttered a wordless exclamation.

About a half hour after his safe arrival, the daring private learned that several of his fellow soldiers of the 369th lay wounded in the mire back in no-man’s-land. McCowin gathered his gear and again climbed out of the trench into the torrent of German fire. He carried back wounded soldier after wounded soldier. It seemed as if the bullets could not hit him. Finally, he was severely gassed, but he still refused to fall back. Instead he crawled out again and carried back another wounded soldier. For his awe-inspiring bravery, Private McCowin was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In relaying the private’s story, one of his commanding officers stressed that McCowin did “all this under fire. That’s the reason he got the Distinguished Service Cross,” one of the army’s highest honors.38

Back during the McCarthy years, institutions like UMass — and outside academia as well; in Hollywood and other parts of the culture industry, and throughout the economy as a whole — were run by nervous administrators and managers and CEOs who wanted to be in compliance with the government. I’m not talking about the true believer anticommunists; just run-of-the-mill, apolitical or even liberal, apparatchiks whose first duty, they felt, was to their job and their institution. Uncertain about the law and the rules, fearful that if they broke them their institutions would suffer, these administrators turned to outside consultants — often, lawyers — for “advice.” Except that the advice industry was itself stacked with two types: either true-believing anticommunists, who had a vested interest in purging the country of reds and leftists and liberals and more, or bottom-liners (and bottom-feeders) whose livelihood depended upon institutions like UMass needing their “advice.” The combination of this advice industry and nervous administrators was lethal: through some elaborate dance of advice and consent, repressive policies were propounded. Not by force, not by threat, but voluntarily, consensually. It wasn’t simply the state that was the problem; it was the relay system of coercion that private actors in civil society set up, that radiated power far beyond what it was capable of, that made the whole system of repression as widespread as it was. This, incidentally, was precisely the kind of society Hobbes envisioned in Leviathan: not simply an all-powerful sovereign, but an army of preachers and teachers, working in churches and — wait for it: universities — who would extend the power of the sovereign far beyond what it could muster.