Revolution Famous Quotes

I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid.

We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn’t worry too much about it.

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.

Paul Goodman famously wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

You could become famous just for being, well, famous.

just as Jeffrey Epstein supplying underage girls to famous and powerful men sounds like particularly bizarre fiction. And yet these things really happened.

As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age.

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.

There is a commonly held belief that rage produces results; that nothing happens in the world without the adrenaline rush of anger. The iconic figure of the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara, famously said, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, you are a comrade of mine.” Perhaps that is true. But in rage, you become one with a group; out of rage, you become one with the universe.

Davy’s work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.

I was someone before I met Alexander Hamilton. Not someone famous or important or with a learned philosophical understanding of all that was at stake in our revolution. Not a warrior or a philosopher or statesman. But I was a patriot. I was no unformed skein of wool for Hamilton to weave together into any tapestry he wished. That's important for me to remember now, when every thread of my life has become tangled with everything he was. Important, I think, in sorting out what can be forgiven, to remember my own experiences - the ones filled with my own yearnings that had nothing to do with him. I was, long before he came into my life, a young woman struggling to understand her place in a changing world. And torn, even then, between loyalty, duty, and honor in the face of betrayal.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

The Algerian fidaï, unlike the unbalanced anarchists made famous in literature, does not take dope. The fidaï does not need to be unaware of danger, to befog his consciousness, or to forgot. The "terrorist," from the moment he undertakes an assignment, allows death to enter into his soul. He has a rendezvous with death.The fidaï, on the other hand, has a rendezvous with the life of the Revolution, and with his own life. The fidaï is not one of the sacrificed. To be sure, he does not shrink before the possibility of losing his life or the independence of his country, but at no moment does he choose death.

Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize.

Although it is not as famous as Kuhn's SSR, Bas van Fraassen's book The Scientific Image (1980) has certainly had a profound effect on the philosophy of science

The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.

Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and

Doug Engelbart demonstrate his oNLine System, made famous at the Mother of All Demos,

When I succeed everyone will applaud my efforts.” For anyone else, these might have been famous last words. For Lafayette, they were his opening lines.

Nine Negro boys in Alabama were on trial for their lives when I got back from Cuba and Haiti. The famous Scottsboro "rape" case was in full session. I visited those boys in the death house at Kilby Prison, and I wrote many poems about them. One of those poems was: CHRIST IN ALABAMA Christ is a Nigger, Beaten and black-- O, bare your back. Mary is His Mother-- Mammy of the South, Silence your mouth. God's His Father-- White Master above, Grant us your love. Most holy bastard Of the bleeding mouth: Nigger Christ On the cross of the South.

Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.

Byron published the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece, and, as he later remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful, seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living the life of a Byronic hero while creating the archetype in his poetry. He became the toast of literary London and was feted at three parties each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristocrat who was later prime minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an unconventional sexual ambiguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing. They had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively. She famously declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” which he was. So was she.

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical.

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .(from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124).

When asked if he thought that the French Revolution had been a good thing, Zhou Enlai famously answered that it was too early to tell, which is trite about the Terror, but it would be true about America. It’s too early to tell. If you take a timeline from the first settlements in the 1600s to the present, and compare it with the foundation of modern Europe from the end of the Roman Empire, at the same point in our history the Vikings are attacking Orkney, and Alfred is the first king of bits of what will one day be England.

papyruses began to appear on the black market. The Egyptian government tried to prevent the manuscripts from leaving the country. After the 1952 revolution, most of the material was handed over to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and declared part of the national heritage. Only one text eluded them, and this had turned up in an antiquarian shop in Belgium. After vain attempts to sell it in New York and Paris, it was finally acquired by the Carl Jung Institute in 1951. On the death of the famous psychoanalyst, the papyrus, now known as Jung Codex, returned to Cairo, where the

There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish.

The Republic is six months old, and it’s flying apart. It has no cohesive force—only a monarchy has that. Surely you can see? We need the monarchy to pull the country together— then we can win the war.” Danton shook his head. “Winners make money,” Dumouriez said. “I thought you went where the pickings were richest?” “I shall maintain the Republic,” Danton said. “Why?” “Because it is the only honest thing there is.” “Honest? With your people in it?” “It may be that all its parts are corrupted, vicious, but take it altogether, yes, the Republic is an honest endeavor. Yes, it has me, it has Fabre, it has Hebert—but it also has Camille. Camille would have died for it in ’89.” “In ’89, Camille had no stake in life. Ask him now—now he’s got money and power, now he’s famous. Ask him now if he’s willing to die.” “It has Robespierre.” “Oh yes—Robespierre would die to get away from the carpenter’s daughter, I don’t doubt.

The corporate media spends a lot of time covering the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, but not all that much time covering the poor and the desperate. To a large degree, these people , the millions of poor people in America, are invisible, living under the radar screen. Their suffering is not seen on our evening news. But it's there.

MAN: Mr. Chomsky, I’m wondering what specific qualifications you have to be able to speak all around the country about world affairs?   None whatsoever. I mean, the qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians—none, none that you don’t have. The only difference is, I don’t pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I’d refuse—because I don’t understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there’s nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think, but there’s nothing deep—if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they’ve been kept a carefully guarded secret. In fact, I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam—it’s kind of like Leninism [position that socialist revolution should be led by a “vanguard” party]: it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke.   MAN: But don’t you also use that system too, because of your name-recognition and the fact that you’re a famous linguist? I mean, would I be invited to go somewhere and give talks?   You think I was invited here because people know me as a linguist? Okay, if that was the reason, then it was a bad mistake. But there are plenty of other linguists around, and they aren’t getting invited to places like this—so I don’t really think that can be the reason. I assumed that the reason is that these are topics that I’ve written a lot about, and I’ve spoken a lot about, and I’ve demonstrated a lot about, and I’ve gone to jail about, and so on and so forth—I assumed that’s the reason. If it’s not, well, then it’s a bad mistake. If anybody thinks that you should listen to me because I’m a professor at M.I.T., that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it. And the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about things that are common sense, that’s just another scam—it’s another way to try to marginalize people, and you shouldn’t fall for it.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.

With his ship faced with the danger of sinking, the Richard’s chief gunner screamed to the Serapis, “Quarter! quarter! for God’s sake!” Jones hurled a pistol at the man, felling him. But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the Serapis’ commander, who called, “Do you ask for quarter?” Through the clash of battle, gunshot and crackle of fire the famous reply came faintly back to him: “I have not yet begun to fight!” Making good his boast, Jones sprang to a 9-pounder whose gun crew were killed or wounded, loaded and fired it himself, aiming at the Serapis’ mainmast, then loaded and fired again. As the mast toppled, Pearson, surrounded by dead, with rigging on fire, hauled down his red ensign in token of surrender. Escorted to Richard’s quarterdeck, he handed over his sword to Jones just as the Serapis’ mainmast crashed over the side and its sail, nevermore to carry the wind, collapsed in a dying billow into the sea.

In 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail, who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The challenge required combining feats of engineering with leaps of pure science. Making use of vacuum tubes and other new technologies, AT&T built repeaters and amplifying devices that accomplished the task in January 1915. On the historic first transcontinental call, in addition to Vail and President Woodrow Wilson, was Bell himself, who echoed his famous words from thirty-nine years earlier, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This time his former assistant Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, replied, “It would take me a week.”1

My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain,” declared a famous brain surgeon, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, in the prestigious Lister Oration in 1949.92 Turing’s response to a reporter from the London Times seemed somewhat flippant, but also subtle: “The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.

Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there’s also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt’s currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there’s an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The implication is clear: the ancients belong to foreigners, and Islam belongs to us.

Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.

The Nook is an under-appreciated genius of a lovemark. The team at Barnes & Noble got a lot right with the Nook, and from a lovemark perspective, I think they created a more intimate product than any other dedicated e-reader. The rubber back behind the Nook is soft and pliable—not hard metal like the later Kindles—making it sensual and intimate. Barnes & Noble also recreated the engraved faces of famous authors from their stores and used them as Nook screensavers. It’s brilliant, not just because it makes reading more intimate, but also because it solidifies the Barnes & Noble brand itself.

When President Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael famously said in disbelief, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”14 Her statement has come to symbolize the insulation of the liberal elite, living in a bubble and hearing only the opinions of fellow liberals. It has become known as “Pauline Kael Syndrome” and its most virulent strain has been discovered in late 2016, complete with paranoid delusions of Russian hacking. Liberals

Zeno of Elea, who belonged to the same philosophical school as Parmenides, formulated a famous paradox designed to show that motion is impossible. After an arrow shot at a target has got halfway there, it still has half the distance to go. When it has gone half that distance, it still has half of the way to go. This goes on forever. The arrow can never reach the target, so motion is impossible. In normal physics, with a notion of time, Zeno's paradox is readily resolved. However, in my timeless view the paradox is resurrected, but the arrow never reaches the target for a more basic reason: the arrow in the bow is not the arrow in the target.

The Jacobins were the standard bearers of the left. Liberals are not on the left. They are in the center, and often trending right with their hatred of the State and any possibility of State social engineering on the grand scale. It has been rightly observed that the hallmark of liberalism is wanting the “thing without the thing”, as Slavoj Zizek famously put it. The liberals want war without war, revolution without revolution, drugs without any of the downside of drugs, coffee without caffeine. They want a situation that inevitably leads to violence, without the violence. They immediately condemn the violence even though violence was implicit in the entire project from the get-go.

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.

On January 30, 1750, Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Boston’s Old West Church and preached on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. His message from Romans 13, titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the High Powers,” became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America.”2 When published, Mayhew’s sermon spread like electricity through the Colonies. John Adams, fourteen at the time, read it over and over “till the Substance of it, was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”3 Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism” for the American Revolution.4 Others have called it “the first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the crown.”5 In

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.1 In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, happiness is the supreme value and psychiatric drugs replace the police and the ballot as the foundation of politics. Every day, each person takes a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people happy without harming their productivity and efficiency. The World State that governs the entire globe is never threatened by wars, revolutions, strikes or demonstrations, because all people are supremely content with their current conditions, whatever they may be. Huxley’s vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness Begins Within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

No one embodied the spirit of the frontier more than Daniel Boone, who faced and defeated countless natural and man-made dangers to literally hand cut the trail west through the wilderness. He marched with then colonel George Washington in the French and Indian War, established one of the most important trading posts in the West, served three terms in the Virginia Assembly, and fought in the Revolution. His exploits made him world famous; he served as the model for James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and numerous other pioneer stories. He was so well known and respected that even Lord Byron, in his epic poem Don Juan, wrote, “Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere …” And yet he was accused of treason—betraying his country—the most foul of all crimes at the time. What really happened to bring him to that courtroom? And was the verdict reached there correct?

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

The Hungryalist or the hungry generation movement was a literary movement in Bengali that was launched in 1961, by a group of young Bengali poets. It was spearheaded by the famous Hungryalist quartet — Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. They had coined Hungryalism from the word ‘Hungry’ used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poetic line “in the sowre hungry tyme”. The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith and was now living on alien food. . . . The movement was joined by other young poets like Utpal Kumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Falguni Roy, Tridib Mitra and many more. Their poetry spoke the displaced people and also contained huge resentment towards the government as well as profanity. … On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants were issued against 11 of the Hungry poets. The charges included obscenity in literature and subversive conspiracy against the state. The court case went on for years, which drew attention worldwide. Poets like Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg visited Malay Roychoudhury. The Hungryalist movement also influenced Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Telugu & Urdu literature.

The Sputnik moment for the Open Classroom movement came in 1983, when a blue-ribbon commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, T. H. Bell, delivered a scathing report, entitled, A Nation at Risk, whose famously ominous conclusion warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The response this time was a fervent and growing bipartisan campaign for more accountability from schools, mostly in the form of more of those standardized tests. And by 2001, “accountability” had become a buzzword. Under President George W. Bush that year, the “No Child Left Behind” Act tied federal funding to students’ performance on tests. Eight years later, President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program sought similar results, although this time using carrots instead of sticks. However the federal policy was constructed, the message was becoming clear: for schools to survive, their students would have to score high on mandated tests. Teachers consequently understood that to preserve their own jobs, they’d have to spend more time and energy on memorization and drills. The classrooms of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution began to look ever more like the dreary common schools of the turn of the twentieth century, and the spirit of Emile retreated once again.

The father of communism, Karl Marx, famously predicted the “withering away of the state” once the proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by antiglobalization authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that economic injustice could be abolished by undermining the sovereignty of states and replacing it with a networked “multitude.”17 Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously. This in turn led a generation of democracy activists in Eastern Europe to envision their own form of statelessness, where a mobilized civil society would take the place of traditional political parties and centralized governments. 18 These activists were subsequently disillusioned by the realization that their societies could not be governed without institutions, and when they encountered the messy compromises required to build them. In the decades since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is democratic, but it is not thereby necessarily happy with its politics or politicians.19 The fantasy of statelessness

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

I’ve worn Niki’s pants for two days now. I thought a third day in the same clothes might be pushing it.” Ian shrugged with indifference. “It might send Derian through the roof, but it doesn’t bother me. Wear what you want to wear.” Eena wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you really feel that way or are you trying to appear more laissez-faire than Derian?” “More laissez-faire?” “Yes. That’s a real word.” “Two words actually,” he grinned. “Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" He coated the words with a heavy French accent. Eena gawked at him. “Since when do you speak French?” “I don’t.” Ian chuckled. “But I did do some research in world history the year I followed you around on Earth. Physics was a joke, but history—that I found fascinating.” Slapping a hand against her chest, Eena exclaimed, “I can’t believe it! Unbeknownst to me, Ian actually studied something in high school other than the library’s collection of sci-fi paperbacks!” He grimaced at her exaggerated performance before defending his preferred choice of reading material. “Hey, popular literature is a valuable and enlightening form of world history. You would know that if you read a book or two.” She ignored his reproach and asked with curiosity, “What exactly did you say?” “In French?” “Duh, yes.” “Don’t ‘duh’ me, you could easily have been referring to my remark about enlightening literature. I know the value of a good book is hard for you to comprehend.” He grinned crookedly at her look of offense and then moved into an English translation of his French quote. “Let it do and let it pass, the world goes on by itself.” “Hmm. And where did that saying come from?” Ian delivered his answer with a surprisingly straight face. “That is what the French Monarch said when his queen began dressing casually. The French revolution started one week following that famous declaration, right after the queen was beheaded by the rest of the aristocracy in her favorite pair of scroungy jeans.” “You are such a brazen-tongued liar!

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

in a famous Massachusetts case, two slaves—Mark and his wife, Phillis—were so charged and executed, even though evidence emerged that their master had abused them. As a gruesome admonition to other blacks of insubordinate mind, Mark’s body was “hung in chains” on Charlestown Common for twenty years (eventually “shrivelling up into some sort of mummy”), and Paul Revere, mindful of his own treason and potential fate, would mournfully note the spot as he passed on his famous ride.

John F. Kennedy famously said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is, of course, true. Quite tragically, Kennedy, who initiated the National Security Doctrine to violently prevent social change in Latin America and who led the United States’ deeper involvement into the effort to destroy Vietnam’s bid for independence, never heeded his own words. It is equally true, especially when talking about the Middle East, that those who make a secular, progressive revolution impossible will make a radical religious revolution inevitable. The United States and its partner Great Britain have made secular revolutions in the Middle East, and Iran in particular, impossible for many decades.

This wider history notwithstanding, I believe India still constitutes a special case. Its distinctiveness is threefold. First, the tradition of the thinker-activist persisted far longer in India than elsewhere. While the men who founded the United States in the late eighteenth century had fascinating ideas about democracy and nationhood, thereafter American politicians have merely governed and ruled, or sometimes misgoverned and misruled.1 Their ideas, such as these are, have come from professional ideologues or intellectuals. On the other hand, from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth century, the most influential political thinkers in India were, as often as not, its most influential political actors. Long before India was conceived of as a nation, in the extended run-up to Indian independence, and in the first few decades of freedom, the most interesting reflections on society and politics were offered by men (and women) who were in the thick of political action. Second, the relevance of individual thinkers too has lasted longer in India. For instance, Lenin’s ideas were influential for about seventy years, that is to say, from the time the Soviet state was founded to the time it disappeared. Mao’s heyday was even shorter—roughly three decades, from the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the repudiation by Deng Xiaoping of his mentor’s ideas in the late 1970s. Turning to politicians in Western Europe, Churchill’s impassioned defence of the British Empire would find no takers after the 1950s. De Gaulle was famous for his invocation of the ‘grandeur de la France’, but those sentiments have now been (fortunately?) diluted and domesticated by the consolidation of the European Union. On the other hand, as this book will demonstrate, Indian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still speak in many ways to the concerns of the present. A third difference has to do with the greater diversity of thinkers within the Indian political tradition. Even Gandhi and Nehru never held the kind of canonical status within their country as Mao or Lenin did in theirs. At any given moment, there were as many Indians who were opposed to their ideas as were guided by them. Moreover, the range of issues debated and acted upon by politicians and social reformers appears to have been far greater in India than in other countries. This depth and diversity of thought was, as I argue below, in good part a product of the depth and diversity of the society itself.

And in the famous picture of the 1776 crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night, two men depicted at the front of the boat include Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell – two black patriots who served with George Washington and other American generals during the Revolution.

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.

Upon his appointment to the Consulate, Napoleon famously declared, “We have finished the romance of the Revolution. We must now begin its history, only seeking what is real and practicable in the application of its principles, and not what is speculative and

The American food writer Michael Pollan famously said that we should ‘eat food, not too much, mostly plants’. Though he wrote it before the revolution in our understanding of the microbiota, we now know it to be truer than ever before.

The importance of capital in the early Industrial Revolution was so great and so obvious everywhere that it gave rise to several new social and economic theories, of which the most famous is Marxism. It also gave rise to the term ‘capitalism’, and this was by no means so acceptable a development. As

His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.

The extended territory of the new national republic was actually its greatest source of strength, wrote Madison in The Federalist, No. 10, the most famous of the eighty-five essays that he, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote in defense of the Constitution in New York. By extending the political arena over the whole nation, Madison concluded, the number of interests and factions in the society would increase to the point where they would check one another and make it less likely that a factious and tyrannical majority could combine in government to oppress the rights of minorities and individuals.

For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of Keeping Up with the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brands - the latter a national fixation spawned in the "luxury revolution" of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.

However radical these changes in executive authority may have been, many Americans believed that they did not get to the heart of the matter and destroy the most insidious and dangerous source of despotism—the executive power of appointment to office. Since in a traditional monarchical society the distribution of offices, honors, and favors affected the social order, Americans were determined that their governors would never again have the capacity to dominate public life. The constitution-makers took exclusive control over appointments to executive and judicial offices from the traditional hands of the governors and gave it in large part to the legislatures. This change was justified by the principle of separation of powers, a doctrine Montesquieu had made famous in the mid eighteenth century. The idea behind maintaining the executive, legislative, and judicial parts of the government separate and distinct was not to protect each power from the others, but to keep the judiciary and especially the legislature free from executive manipulation—the very kind of manipulation that, Americans believed, had corrupted the English Parliament.

Lenin had created the conditions for the rise of Stalin, but like Dr Frankenstein the monster outgrew him. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 May 1922 and from this time forward his involvement in political affairs was sporadic. Too late he realised, on 25 December 1922, that Stalin represented a real threat to the stability of the Party. He penned a postscript to his famous “Testament”. This called for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary but significantly not from the Politburo. Despite Lenin’s request, the “Testament” was only discussed in the Central Committee, and Stalin’s offer to resign as General Secretary was rejected by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had now formed a triumvirate with him, and during Lenin’s illness Zinoviev had assumed nominal leadership of the Party. Fearing that any demotion of Stalin would lead to the elevation of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only supported him, but hushed up the letters of Lenin.

(you have to eat, even in the middle of famous historical events),

The Bloomsbury set, for instance, who famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’, had plenty of illicit sexual encounters.

Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda.

Among the dismissive was writer Tom Wolfe, who divined the zeitgeist of the era when he dubbed the seventies “The Me Decade” in his famous 1976 essay. Wolfe appropriately defamed the era as a time in which individual emancipation trumped the idea of the civic good, in which decadence looked liked politics, and glitter could be mistaken for substance. If the political revolution could not be realized in post-sixties America, Wolfe argued, the only thing left was the “alchemical dream” of revolutionizing the self. As if to confirm Wolfe’s analysis, the seventies would often be symbolized by a spinning mirrored disco ball reflecting a mosaic of “hundreds of little me’s”—swirling fragments of individualism that made a mockery of the antediluvian dream of solidarity.9

zygotes by definition are rather limited in number and most scientists working in very early development use cells from a bit later, the famous embryonic stem (ES) cells.

The only way to argue this in a comprehensive way would be to adopt a universal skepticism about method. The most famous case for such skepticism is the 1975 book Against Method by maverick philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend appeals to the history of science to argue that no methodological prescription has ever been consistently followed in science

From its earliest forms, utopian fiction has depicted imaginary just and rational societies established in opposition to exploitative worldly ones. Marx was famously reluctant to describe the utopian society that would succeed the successful proletarian revolution, describing it only in the vaguest terms in the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless he affirmed its importance as an historical goal. Marx also valued technology as a vital tool of human liberation. He believed that in a just world technological innovations were the guarantors of human freedom from toil, just as they were also the means of mass enslavement in an exploitative order. These ideas were forged in Marxist thought into a story of social and technological liberation that had clear affinities with the basic stories of

As with Nazism, the conspiracy theory needed Jews. The Iranian interior minister said that Zionists had ‘direct involvement’ in publishing the book. The Iranian president said that ‘Zionist-controlled news agencies’ had made Rushdie famous. In Syria, the Ba’athist dictatorship said that the novel was part of a plot to distract the world’s attention from Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In Pakistan, religious leaders talked of an ‘American Jewish conspiracy’. Across the planet, the drums shuddered to the same beat: ‘It’s the Jews, it’s the Jews, it’s the Jews.’ The demonstrations against Rushdie were not confined to the poor world. The faithful marched in Bradford and London as well as Tehran and Lahore. They inspired a fear in the West that went almost unnoticed during the elation the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe produced.

From its earliest forms, utopian fiction has depicted imaginary just and rational societies established in opposition to exploitative worldly ones. Marx was famously reluctant to describe the utopian society that would succeed the successful proletarian revolution, describing it only in the vaguest terms in the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless he affirmed its importance as an historical goal. Marx also valued technology as a vital tool of human liberation. He believed that in a just world technological innovations were the guarantors of human freedom from toil, just as they were also the means of mass enslavement in an exploitative order. These ideas were forged in Marxist thought into a story of social and technological liberation that had clear affinities with the basic stories of sf.

Beyond the nonnegotiables of rule by the ulama and the enactment of Islamic law, Khomeini had never given much thought to what an Islamic state should look like. He once famously answered a question about his economic policies by declaring that “economics is for donkeys.” Later he observed in his dour way that “we did not make a revolution to slash the price of watermelon.” Khomeini, in short, was a classic big-picture man. To him, the details of governance mattered little, if at all. Still, his lieutenants had a country to run. Many borrowed ideas from the copious works of Sunni fundamentalist thinkers in Pakistan and the Arab world to give shape to the Islamic Republic. The state that Khomeini built would be an intolerant theocracy in which Islamic law was narrowly interpreted and implemented to limit individual and minority rights and erase all Western influences on society and culture.

The most famous and highest ranking Chinese in the Red Army was Ren Fuchen, aged thirty-three at the time of the Revolution and considered China’s first Bolshevik.

The dungeons—arranged along a hallway on the first floor, fifteen to a side, all divided by concrete partitions—were famous throughout Puerto Rico. This hallway was covered with filth, barely lit and poorly ventilated. Each row of fifteen cells shared a common roof of iron bars as thick as railroad tracks, topped with steel walkways. The guards patrolled them from opposite ends, stopping when they met in the middle to retrace their steps. It was a vantage point, like a captain’s bridge: the guards could look down and see every occupant of every cell. They could also point their rifles at them.

Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a world-famous physician who practiced in France, England, and the United States in the mid-1800s. He claimed that he “rejuvenated sexual prowess after eating extracts of monkey testis.” Those who adhere to Mark Twain’s suggestion that you should eat a live frog for breakfast, because nothing worse can then happen to your day, clearly haven’t reckoned with Brown-Séquard’s approach to self-improvement!

Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man. The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel's famous observation on how the Salpetriere mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity. It was as simple as that.

Once World War II began, he argued that women’s participation in the war effort would give them even more strength and speed up this coming matriarchy. Wonder Woman comics were his way to prepare young readers for this inevitable revolution.

Napoleon famously declared, “We have finished the romance of the Revolution. We must now begin its history, only seeking what is real and practicable in the application of its principles, and not what is speculative and hypothetical.

Missha’s First Treatment Essence. Some other good choices include SK-II’s Facial Treatment Essence and Innisfree’s Eco-Science Spot Treatment Essence. Missha also has a famous ampoule known as Time Revolution Night Repair New Science Activator Ampoule. Other good serums are It’s Skin’s Prestige Serum and Skin Food’s Peach Sake Pore Serum. After

In May of 1952, about a dozen individuals lead by Fidel Castro formed a group of anti-Batista rebels called “The Movement.” Fidel Castro had become a well-known activist and wrote articles intended to fire up the public in an underground newspaper El Acusador (The Accuser). In one year, his group grew to about 1,200 people. They began accumulating weapons with the idea that they would openly attack a Batista stronghold as a uniformed militant force. Being careful, Castro kept his intentions secret and only a few people knew that the target would be the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack on the second largest military barracks in Cuba, named after General Guillermón Moncada, a hero of the War of Independence, was worked out in the tiny two-room apartment of Abel Santamaría. Abel and his sister Haydée lived on the corner of 25th and O Streets in El Vedado, Havana. Only Abel, Haydée and seven other people were entrusted with the details of the attack. Tight security was maintained throughout and since the volunteers of the revolution were divided into cells, few of them knew each other…. One hundred and thirty two men and two women went up against 1,000 trained soldiers and although the battle ended badly for the Castro brothers, the attack on the barracks caused a public fury throughout Cuba. At his sentencing for leading the failed mission, Fidel delivered his famous “History will Absolve Me” speech. Read more in “The Exciting Story of Cuba.

Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.

When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai in the 1950s famously remarked, “It’s too early to tell.

Perhaps the most famous, if flawed, oracle of the Federal Reserve, former chairman Alan Greenspan, knew that money was something that not only central bankers could create. In a speech in 1996, just as the Cypherpunks were pushing forward with their experiments, Greenspan said that he imagined that the technological revolution could bring back the potential for private money and that it might actually be a good thing: “We could envisage proposals in the near future for issuers of electronic payment obligations, such as stored-value cards or ‘digital cash,’ to set up specialized issuing corporations with strong balance sheets and public credit ratings.

Determinism says that our behaviour is determined by two causes: our heredity and our environment. Heredity refers to the genes we inherit from our parents, while environment refers not only to our current environment but also to the environments we have experienced in the past—in effect, to all the experiences we have had from the time we were born. Determinism, in other words, says that our behaviour is entirely determined by our genes and experiences: if we knew every gene and every experience a person had, then, in principle, we could predict exactly what they would do at every moment in time. (p. 4) And now we may be on the brink of yet another revolution. It has been taking place largely out of public view, in psychology laboratories around the world. Its implications, however, are profound. It is telling us that just as we lost our belief that we are at the centre of the universe, we may also be losing our claim to stand aloof from the material world, to rise above the laws of physics and chemistry that bind other species. Our behaviour, it suggests, is just as lawful, just as determined, as that of every other living creature. (p. 6) Also, while determinism is clearly contrary to the religious doctrine of free will, it is important to note that it is not contrary to religion per se. Einstein famously said that ‘God does not play dice’ with nature. He believed in some form of creation, but he found it inconceivable that God would have left the running of this universe to chance. Determinism assumes that the universe is lawful, but it makes no assumptions about how this universe came into being. (p. 11) Another way in which parents influence their children’s behaviour is simply by being who they are. Children have a strong tendency to imitate adults, especially when the adult is important in their lives, and you can’t get much more important to a child than a parent. (p. 62) What children see does influence their understanding of how to get along in the world, of what is and isn’t acceptable. (p. 64) Our need to be liked, combined with our horror of being rejected or ostracized, can influence all of us. (p. 79) It is the brain which gives rise to thought: no brain activity, no thought. (p. 90) We’ve seen that everything we think, feel and do depends on the existence of an intact brain – (p. 92) …: that what remains in memory is not necessarily the precise details of an experience but our interpretation of that experience. (p. 140) According to determinism, it is your behaviour which is determined, not events. … The future is not preordained; if you change your behaviour, your future will also change. (p. 151) It is our brains that determine what we think and feel; if our brains don’t function properly, consciousness is disrupted. (p. 168) Given how much of our mental processing takes place in the unconscious, it is perhaps not surprising that we are often unaware of the factors that have guided our conscious thought. … …, but insofar as behaviour is determined by the environment, then by changing that environment we can change that behaviour. (p. 169)

At various times during the 1950's and 1960's attempts were made by leaders in Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to unite as a single Arab nation, but due to the famous independent streak ingrained in the Arab personality, nothing came of those efforts. In fact, the Middle East has suffered from numerous uprisings, wars, and violent revolutions since the end of World War I right up to the present day.

The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

The Imam Ali says in a famous hadith (sacred saying) from Islam, “People are asleep as long as they are alive. When they die, they wake up.

The most famous answer to the question, “What is a sans-culotte?” defined him as “a being who always goes on foot, who has no millions… and who lives simply on the fourth or fifth story with his wife and children, if he has any. He is useful, because he knows how to plow a field, to work a forge, a saw, a file, to cover a roof, make shoes and give the last drop of his blood for the Republic.

The city had 72 straight, wide and well-built streets and sidewalks. The Congress meeting hall has the “finest view imaginable,” and there is a “very famous College with the title of University” (the present University of Pennsylvania). At the home of Joseph Reed, “President of the State [sic] of Pennsylvania,” the visitors are entertained at a ceremonial dinner of which the main feature was an immense ninety-pound turtle with soup served in its shell.