“
It is not the actions of others which trouble us (for those actions are controlled by their governing part), but rather it is our own judgments. Therefore remove those judgments and resolve to let go of your anger, and it will already be gone. How do you let go? By realizing that such actions are not shameful to you.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius
“
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appalling powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi's once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O'Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called "In These Times."
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic "New York Times" guaranteed there were weapons of destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
“
There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.
”
”
Jonathan Kozol (The Shame of the Nation)
“
People in third world countries aren't living in poverty, they're living pretty much as nature intended us to live it and putting us all to shame
”
”
James Perrin (The Occasional Swearing Of Politician Perrin)
“
That was the real reason abuse was so common, Isra thought for the first time. Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them.
”
”
Etaf Rum (A Woman Is No Man)
“
During the fifteen minutes that followed, the proud and sensitive girl suffered a shame and pain which she never forgot. To others it might seem a ludicrous or trivial affair, but to her it was a hard experience, for during the twelve years of her life she had been governed by love alone
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
“
Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force.
”
”
Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
“
The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber...Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful 'sovereign,' on account of the 'protection' he affords you.
”
”
Lysander Spooner
“
What do I pay attention to? Paul says that what we pay attention to doubles back and governs us. Hence our attention is deeply associated with either death or life.
”
”
Curt Thompson (The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves)
“
A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.
”
”
Criss Jami (Healology)
“
One of the great things about life is that you can start over. With God there are always new beginnings and second chances. He specializes in giving people fresh starts. While you may feel overwhelmed at times and held back by painful recollections haunting fears remorse shame or guilt God’s power in your present life is not limited by what took place in your past. When you are governed and manipulated by your painful memories you allow your past to control your future. But when you choose to give God the controls He can do amazing things with the rest of your life. You can start now and have a brand-new ending
”
”
Sue Augustine (When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond Fears That Hold You Back)
“
You might think that after all the shameful capitulations made by the government during the ups and downs of their negotiations with the maphia ... they could sink no lower. Alas, when one advances blindly across the boggy ground of realpolitik, when pragmatism takes up the baton and conducts the orchestra, ignoring what is written in the score, you can be pretty sure that, as the imperative logic of dishonor will show, there are still, after all, a few more steps to descend.
”
”
José Saramago (Death with Interruptions)
“
It is a shame that those we elected to represent us are now turning to us with questions rather than solutions. If we can do it ourselves, why do we need them?
”
”
Don Santo
“
These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because regular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.
”
”
Amanda Ripley (The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why)
“
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
“
Political prisoners describe:
- extreme physical and emotional torture
- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality
- sham killings
- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death
- being forced to witness abusive acts on others
- being forced to make impossible "choices"
- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment
- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks
- being forced to hurt others
Ritual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.
”
”
Laurie Matthew (Who Dares Wins)
“
If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame." No:
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience)
“
They are often brave, I'm sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.
”
”
Gregory David Roberts
“
The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.
”
”
Jean Lorrain (Le crime des riches suivi de Paris forain"" (French Edition))
“
The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order. We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms. When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things. In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: 'that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.' If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion. But cooking doesn't only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into a savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this! Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter--this quantity of sacrificed life--just before the body takes its first destructive bite.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
A particularly strategic maneuver is to decide that if we don’t understand something it must be wrong. After all, wrong is simpler than not knowing. Wrong means I am not stupid or failing. See all that sneaky, slimy projection happening there? Projection shields us from personal responsibility. It obscures our shame and confusion and places the onus for reconciling it on the body of someone else. We don’t have to work to understand something when it is someone else’s “fault.” We don’t have to undo the shame-based beliefs we were brought up with. We don’t have to question our parents, friends, churches, synagogues, mosques, government, media. We don’t have to challenge or be challenged.
”
”
Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
“
The logic is that if you’ve got excess money and throw it away on booze and cigarettes, then that’s your business. But if you’re poor, then that’s a sin and a shame. Because if you’re poor, rich people assume you’re on welfare, or you’re getting food stamps or some other social services. Once you take a penny from the government, a morality clause goes into effect, where you’re never allowed to have anything that you might actually enjoy. It’s the hair shirt of welfare.
”
”
Linda Tirado (Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America)
“
Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are “delivered,” through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the pretended concern with children (who suffer worse at the hands of the faithful than any other group). Male and female genital mutilation; the terrifying of infants with hideous fictions about guilt and hell; the wild prohibition of masturbation: religion will never be able to live down the shame with which it has stained itself for generations in this regard, anymore than it can purge its own guilt for the ruining of formative periods of precious life.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
I am enormously proud to be an American. I would say that the things that our corporate-controlled government has done at best are shameful and at worst genocidal-but there's an incredible and a permanent culture of resistance in this country that I'm very proud to be a part of. It's not the tradition of slave-owningfounding fathers, it's the tradition of the Frederick Douglasses, the Underground Railroads, the Chief Josephs, the Joe Hills, and the Huey P. Newtons. There's so much to be proud of when you're American that's hidden from you. The incredible courage and bravery of the union organizers in the late 1800's and early 1900's-that's amazing. People of get tricked into going overseas and fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street wars, but these are people who knew what they were fighting for here at home. I think that that's so much more courageous and brave.
”
”
Tom Morello
“
This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.
”
”
Barry Unsworth (Morality Play)
“
I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain. Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more.
The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community.
I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.
”
”
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
“
I reply with my own bout of sarcasm, speaking in my best George Dubya voice. “Corporate America, driven by the power elite, a group so powerful they orchestrate wars in order to generate wealth—incomprehensible wealth. A group of people loyal to no country—whose interests know no borders—who manipulate all peoples and cultures equally, adhering to no government regulations. And as long as the people continue to elect dumb politicians like myself, it will be easy to maintain control. Just remember, America, fool me once, shame on…shame on you… Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.
”
”
Aaron B. Powell (Priority)
“
Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there . . . The person who can go and look on death merely to gratify an idle humor is destitute both of humanity and piety.
”
”
Jon Ronson (So You've Been Publicly Shamed)
“
Slavery happened. That flag stands for segregation. We have monuments to Civil War generals and slave owners, as well as preserved plantations. But we have only one slavery museum, and that was built by a private citizen. We have no national or federal slavery museum. There is no government-funded slavery museum. A proposal to put one in Virginia came through in 2001 and went unfunded and failed. Another one in Richmond reached a similar fate. This is absolutely shameful.
”
”
Trae Crowder (The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark)
“
The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.
”
”
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
“
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed, without opposition, by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today, every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?
”
”
Olivia Hawker (The Ragged Edge of Night)
“
It's emphasis of the same, a nemesis with my name, scheme created impressions of a mind game for everyone who over-seas. What a shame for those who haven't figured it out.
”
”
Jose R. Coronado (The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey)
“
It's a sin and a shame before God that these people who govern us would let things come to such a sad state. But God is not dead.
--Fred Shuttlesworth
”
”
Andrew Aydin (March: Book Two (March, #2))
“
What does it mean when individuals can no longer be embarrassed or shamed?
”
”
Janine R. Wedel (Shadow Elite: How the World s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market)
“
Mark Twain who said, “The only rational patriotism is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
”
”
Letty Cottin Pogrebin (Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy)
“
What a shame that the mind can command the face to assume whatever look or expression it pleases, but cannot command itself and govern its own thoughts.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
The government had to choose between shame and war. They have chosen shame, and now they will get war.
”
”
Winston Groom (1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls)
“
For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Sodom and Gomorrah)
“
It's a shame, when I'm at the checkout line, and the cashier holds up my bill to the light, in search for a ghost president, or slashing a yellow marker to see if counterfeit. Even in money we can't be trusted. Makes we wonder whats next, will the government make a marker to slash our hand, or an x-ray we will have to walk through, to check if we have a dishonest heart or corrupt spirit?
”
”
Anthony Liccione
“
Confucius said,—“If a State is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a State is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
“
YORK.
She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth,
How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph, like an Amazonian trull,
Upon their woes whom fortune captivates!
But that thy face is, vizard-like, unchanging,
Made impudent with use of evil deeds,
I would assay, proud queen, to make thee blush.
To tell thee whence thou cam'st, of whom deriv'd,
Were shame enough to shame thee, wert thou not shameless.
Thy father bears the type of King of Naples,
Of both the Sicils and Jerusalem,
Yet not so wealthy as an English yeoman.
Hath that poor monarch taught thee to insult?
It needs not, nor it boots thee not, proud queen;
Unless the adage must be verified,
That beggars mounted run their horse to death.
'T is beauty that doth oft make women proud;
But, God he knows, thy share thereof is small.
'T is virtue that doth make them most admir'd;
The contrary doth make thee wond'red at.
'T is government that makes them seem divine;
The want thereof makes thee abominable.
Thou art as opposite to every good
As the Antipodes are unto us,
Or as the south to the Septentrion.
O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide!
How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child,
To bid the father wipe his eyes withal,
And yet be seen to bear a woman's face?
Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible;
Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.
Bid'st thou me rage? why, now thou hast thy wish:
Wouldst have me weep? why, now thou hast thy will;
For raging wind blows up incessant showers,
And when the rage allays the rain begins.
These tears are my sweet Rutland's obsequies,
And every drop cries vengeance for his death,
'Gainst thee, fell Clifford, and thee, false Frenchwoman.
”
”
William Shakespeare
“
How could she make Sarah understand what it was like back home, where no woman would think to call the cops if her husband beat her? And even if she somehow found the strength to stand up for herself, what good would it do when she had no money, no education, no job to fall back on? That was the real reason abuse was so common, Isra thought for the first time. Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them. Isra wanted to cry at the thought. She was ashamed to be a woman, ashamed for herself and for her daughters.
”
”
Etaf Rum (A Woman Is No Man)
“
They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“
Oh, for shame! You who are educated by a Christian government in the art of war; the practice of whose profession makes you natural enemies of the savages, so called by you. Yes, you, who call yourselves the great civilization; you who have knelt upon Plymouth Rock, covenanting with God to make this land the home of the free and the brave. Ah, then you rise from your bended knees and seizing the welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land, which you are not, your carbines rise upon the bleak shore, and your so-called civilization sweeps inland from the ocean wave; but, oh, my God! leaving its pathway marked by crimson lines of blood; and strewed by the bones of two races, the inheritor and the invader; and I am crying out to you for justice,—yes, pleading for the far-off plains of the West, for the dusky mourner, whose tears of love are pleading for her husband, or for their children, who are sent far away from them.
”
”
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims)
“
(...) psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual.
”
”
Dossie Easton (The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities)
“
Societies depend on the good faith of those who govern them more than most folks realize. People count on shame to keep bad actors in line. But when someone utterly shameless comes along and just runs roughshod over the law? No one knows what to do.
”
”
David Mack (Star Trek: Picard: Firewall)
“
The greater and better parts of Christendom would be very wrong, seeing themselves presently governed by princesses whose natural intelligence, seasoned by long experience of good and bad fortune both in wars and domestic matters, have put a great many kings to shame.
”
”
Pierre de Rasnard
“
I believe this movement will prevail.
I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else.
Quite the opposite.
I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense.
I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives.
My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different.
We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric.
It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers.
“We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus.
Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally.
What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.
”
”
Paul Hawken
“
Vulnerability is usually attacked, not with fists but with shaming. Many children learn quickly to cover up any signs of weakness, sensitivity, and fragility, as well as alarm, fear, eagerness, neediness, or even curiosity. Above all, they must never disclose that the teasing has hit its mark. Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend.
Signs of alarm may provoke verbal taunts such as “fraidy cat” or “chicken.” Tears evoke ridicule. Expressions of curiosity can precipitate the rolling of eyes and accusations of being weird or nerdy. Manifestations of tenderness can result in incessant teasing. Revealing that something caused hurt or really caring about something is risky around someone uncomfortable with his vulnerability. In the company of the desensitized, any show of emotional openness is likely to be targeted.
The vulnerability engendered by peer orientation can be overwhelming even when children are not hurting one another. This vulnerability is built into the highly insecure nature of peer-oriented relationships. Vulnerability does not have to do only with what is happening but with what could happen — with the inherent insecurity of attachment. What we have, we can lose, and the greater the value of what we have, the greater the potential loss. We may be able to achieve closeness in a relationship, but we cannot secure it in the sense of holding on to it — not like securing a rope or a boat or a fixed interest-bearing government bond.
One has very little control over what happens in a relationship, whether we will still be wanted and loved tomorrow. Although the possibility of loss is present in any relationship, we parents strive to give our children what they are constitutionally unable to give to one another: a connection that is not based on their pleasing us, making us feel good, or reciprocating in any way. In other words, we offer our children precisely what is missing in peer attachments: unconditional acceptance.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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I love this country. I loved it the first time I came here, back in 1963. I love it because it’s free. My mother escaped from Nazi Germany; the rest of her family never made it. The first thing Hitler did was take over the press and make it subservient to the government. Lenin did the same.” Jasper had drunk a few glasses of wine, and as a result he was a shade more candid. “America is free because it has disrespectful newspapers and television shows to expose and shame presidents who fuck the Constitution up the ass.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to the free press. Here’s to disrespect. And God bless America.
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3))
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Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women--foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried. Illogical and shameful as they seemed in retrospect, those experiences enriched modern Man. Few races had made so many mistakes in so short a time, or tried so many tentative solutions to hopeless problems.
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David Brin (Startide Rising (The Uplift Saga, #2))
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Someone has to champion us if the government won’t. During the Draft Riots back home, mobs attacked members of the race all over the city. They even burned down a Colored orphanage. Those who hate us have no shame, and if dragging them from their houses teaches them a lesson, I’m all for dragging them out every night until they learn.
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Beverly Jenkins (Rebel (Women Who Dare, #1))
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Because let’s talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does what we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm. Yet
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Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
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Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.
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Norman Geras (A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq)
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Journalists are not entertainers. We are reporters. We go to places that are unpopular. We broadcast voices that are controversial. We are not here to win popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure the media, to shame the media into going into these forgotten places where so many are sent to waste away in silence.
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Amy Goodman (The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them)
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If the foot had never realized it belonged to the body, & that there never was a body on which it depended, if it had only known & loved itself & then came to know that it really belonged to the body on which it depended, think of the regret & shame it would feel for its past existence. It would recognize how useless it had been to the body in spite of the life poured into it, & how it would have been destroyed if the body had rejected it & cut it off as the foot cut itself off from the body! How it would have desired earnestly to be kept on! How obediently it would let itself be governed by the will in charge of the body, to the point of being amputated if necessary! Otherwise it would cease to a member, for every member must be ready to perish for the sake of the whole, for whose sake alone exists.
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Blaise Pascal (The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent)
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In truth, if anything is a sin, it is blind obedience to "authority." Acting as an enforcer for "government" amounts to spiritual suicide—actually worse than physical suicide, because every authoritarian "enforcer" not only shuts off the free will and ability to judge which make him human (thus "killing" his own humanity) but also leaves his body intact, to be used by tyrants as a tool for oppression. To be a "law enforcer" is to willingly change one's self from a person into a robot—a robot which is then given to some of the most evil people in the world, to be used to dominate and subjugate the human race. Wearing the uniform of a soldier or the badge of a "law enforcer" is not a reason for pride; it should be cause for great shame at having forsaken one’s own humanity in favor of becoming a pawn of oppressors.
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Larken Rose (The Most Dangerous Superstition)
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Projection shields us from personal responsibility. It obscures our shame and confusion and places the onus for reconciling it on the body of someone else. We don’t have to work to understand something when it is someone else’s fault. We don’t have to undo the shame-based beliefs we were brought up with. We don’t have to question our parents, friends, churches, synagogues, mosques, government, media. We don’t have to challenge or be challenged.
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Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
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It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders. To read the history of kings, a man would be almost inclined to suppose that government consisted in stag-hunting, and that every nation paid a million a-year to a huntsman. Man ought to have pride, or shame enough to blush at being thus imposed upon, and when he feels his proper character he will. Upon all subjects of this nature, there is often passing in the mind, a train of ideas he has not yet accustomed himself to encourage and communicate. Restrained by something that puts on the character of prudence, he acts the hypocrite upon himself as well as to others. It is, however, curious to observe how soon this spell can be dissolved. A single expression, boldly conceived and uttered, will sometimes put a whole company into their proper feelings: and whole nations are acted on in the same manner.
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Thomas Paine (Rights of Man)
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There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.
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Christopher Caldwell (The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties)
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Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.
When we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find "like-minded" people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissent opinion, as a member of a group.
It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced - something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again - for they have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.
A typical test, or experiment, on this theme goes like this. A group of people are taken into the researcher's confidence. A minority of one or two are left in the dark. Some situation demanding measurement or assessment is chosen. For instance, comparing lengths of wood that differ only a little from each other, but enough to be perceptible, or shapes that are almost the same size. The majority in the group - according to instruction- will assert stubbornly that these two shapes or lengths are the same length, or size, while the solitary individual, or the couple, who have not been so instructed will assert that the pieces of wood or whatever are different. But the majority will continue to insist - speaking metaphorically - that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.
When put as baldly, as unflatteringly, as this, reactions tend to be incredulous: "I certainly wouldn't give in, I speak my mind..." But would you?
People who have experienced a lot of groups, who perhaps have observed their own behaviour, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one's group, a group of one's peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it.
In other words, we know that this is true of human behaviour, but how do we know it? It is one thing to admit it in a vague uncomfortable sort of way (which probably includes the hope that one will never again be in such a testing situation) but quite another to make that cool step into a kind of objectivity, where one may say, "Right, if that's what human beings are like, myself included, then let's admit it, examine and organize our attitudes accordingly.
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Doris Lessing (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside)
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Actually, the worst possible plan would also include trying to squash action in every other country, too. And that’s what the entire government-hating network managed to achieve in 2017, when President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. It was as shameful a moment as any in our recent history: the country that produces more carbon than any other announcing that it was now the only country on earth not willing to make even a modest international commitment to solving climate change.
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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Toxic and narcissistic people are often prone to vindictiveness because their external image governs them, and anything that punctures their public image, that otherwise threatens their self-esteem, or that risks bringing shame onto them is unendurable, so they fight back the only way they know, which is via antagonism rather than negotiation, compromise, or diplomacy. In essence, because they are so insecure, they engage in grand gestures to show others “who is boss.” They enjoy making examples of other people.
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Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
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The ‘60s were a very turbulent time for colored people. Being away at war was a chance for them to escape the racial bullshit for a while. It was a shame it came down to that kind of choice.
Don’t get me wrong. There were plenty of guys, who tried to bring that racial crap over there with them. However, when the shit hits the fan, you don’t give a damn about who’s standing next to you, saving your ass. You certainly don’t care what color his skin is or what language he speaks. All that matters to you is that he is an American G.I. Government Issued, baby!
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Jason Medina (No Hope For The Hopeless At Kings Park)
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about society buying itself a slave. Who from? From destitution. From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from dire poverty. A painful bargain. A soul for a bit of bread. Destitution makes an offer, society gives the nod. The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it has not yet managed to permeate it. They say slavery has vanished from European civilization. That is wrong. It still exists, but it now preys only on women, and it goes by the name of prostitution. It preys on women, meaning on grace, on weakness, on beauty, on the maternal. It is not the least of man’s shameful secrets. At the point we have reached in this doleful drama, there is nothing left of the Fantine of the past. In becoming trash she turned to marble. Whoever touches her feels cold. She wafts into view, she goes along with you yet knows nothing about you; she is the face of dishonor and severity. Life and the social order have had their final say. All that can happen has happened to her. She has felt everything, accepted everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, cried over everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference just as death resembles sleep. Nothing is too awful for her now. She fears nothing. Let the sky fall on her head, let the whole ocean crash over her! What does she care? She is a sponge already completely soaked. That, at least, is what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that you can exhaust fate or that you ever hit rock bottom—in anything. Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this? He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole. He is alone. His name is God.
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Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
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In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does what we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm.
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Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
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But the truth is, the multicultural movement, especially as presented in our educational institutions, isn't really about fostering greater respect among people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It's about building the self-esteem of certain ethnic groups while shaming those who have the audacity to prefer a distinct American culture. And most of all, it's about manipulating the expectations of an entire generation so they'll abandon our nation's heritage of American exceptionalism and benevolent hegemony and instead go marching into the glorious sunset of our republican form of government toward unambitious, unmotivated, uninspired, unexceptional socialism.
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Marybeth Hicks (Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom)
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The LORD through His prophet, Jeremiah, said, “For my people are foolish; they know me not; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are ‘wise’ in doing evil! But how to do good they know not.” (Jeremiah 4: 22). Will this rebuke hold true for you? Sad to note that our knowledge of the LORD is at a play school level. In contrast to our knowledge on the heads of the government, politics, politicians, sports, celebrities, elders, believers, neighbours, friends, relatives, wife, husband, children, our own subjects of expertise etc., which can fetch us a doctoral degree! Shameful, isn’t it? Time to get back on course to pursue after the knowledge of the LORD.
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Royal Raj S
“
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who 'but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.
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Theodore Roosevelt
“
To-do list:
1. Science – stop people from getting sick and dying.
2. Keep people economically solvent – as you request their help in fighting the pandemic.
Some states do better at one. Others, at the other. None strike the right balance. Everything collapses. Utter failure.
One party is full of bad ideas that their rivals merely rubber-stamp. Like a reverse Robin Hood, they scapegoat the powerless, while simultaneously handing out checks to the richest stakeholders. The other party has few ideas, except for a few bad ones of their own that they throw into the mix. Businesses, flush with cash, appear almost embarrassed to take public money. But they soon get over their initial shame.
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Gary Floyd (Eyes Open With Your Mask On)
“
Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that effectively removed all oversight and outside control over the speculation in commodities, one of the major reasons food prices have soared. In 2008 and again in 2010 prices for crops such as rice, wheat and corn doubled and even tripled, making life precarious for hundreds of millions of people. And it was all done so a few corporate oligarchs, the 1 percent, could make personal fortunes in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite a damning 650-page Senate subcommittee investigation report, no individual at Goldman Sachs has been indicted, although the report accuses Goldman of defrauding its clients.319
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Tim Wise (Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (City Lights Open Media))
“
The LORD through His prophet, Jeremiah, said, “For my people are foolish; they know me not; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are ‘wise’ in doing evil! But how to do good they know not.” (Jeremiah 4: 22). Will this rebuke hold true for you? Sad to note that our knowledge of the LORD is at a play school level, in contrast to our knowledge on the heads of the government, politics, politicians, sports, celebrities, elders, believers, neighbours, friends, relatives, wife, husband, children, our own subjects of expertise etc., which can fetch us a doctoral degree! Shameful, isn’t it? The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding (Proverbs 9: 10).
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Royal Raj S
“
to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world takes place also. You, yourself, have had passions that made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame -
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead. This is true in corporations, nonprofits, universities, governments, faith communities, schools, families, and sports programs. If you think back on any major scandal fueled by cover-ups, you’ll see this same pattern. And the restitution and resolution of cover-ups almost always happens in the wilderness—when one person steps outside their bunker and speaks their truth.
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Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: Reese's Book Club: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
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The truth is every single one of us possesses lights and shadows. And everything serves us on some level.
Other people have their freedom to choose how they think, feel, believe and act. We need not be offended by anything anyone else says or does. By law, some actions will bring natural consequences that are less-than-pleasant. These natural laws govern reality ... whether we understand, know about, or believe in them or not.
The core truth is that freedom comes when we stop worrying about what other people think, feel, or believe; and concern ourselves with our own integrity, our own personal responsibility and our own alignment with the natural laws that govern freedom.
As we move out of blame, shame and victimhood, we come to a place of true personal empowerment and freedom. We come to understand that we cannot personally be free until we respect the freedom of every other person on this planet. We cannot fully express our highest and best selves until we respect other people's law-abiding-right to express themselves.
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Marnie Pehrson Kuhns
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The United States has had only one woman of color serve as governor and one lesbian woman. All the other intersections of identity… zero. This country is not an anomaly in its history of centralizing political power toward a very specific sort of body; most nations have a default body in their government structures. Although social and cultural realities may shift what those bodies look like, using default bodies to establish a social hierarchy and distribute power and resources is a global phenomenon. The statistics above illustrate an irrefutable truth: body shame and oppression are both symptoms of and tools in a far more complex and sweeping system of access and resources. A system that impacts not only how we feel about ourselves but also our opportunities and ability to thrive in the world. There is a reason we hate our bodies, and it isn’t because of Curtis, our mamas, or even our low self-esteem. We are saddled with body shame because it is an age-old system whose roots and pockets are deep. Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.
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Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
“
It is not a small thing I want...but it is very important to the Kurds, to all Kurds. Perhaps it would be too easy to ask you to simply be a partisan of the Kurds in the counsels of your country, but it is more than that. We ask you to explain our situation so that all people in your country may understand and appreciate our struggle. It is the Kurd who will decide the direction and activity of his own political future, but a great deal of our hope will depend upon the final attitude of friendship or enmity from the powerful Englis . Perhaps all over the world there are primitive peoples like the Kurd, seeking independence, political expression, and material progress. There are certain things that we can do for ourselves, but so much depends upon the large countries. Their governments shape the primitive states by rich and powerful influence. Much of the responsibility for our situation therefore depends upon the people of your own country. If they apathetic and ignorant of our Kurdish aspirations; If they make no attempt to influence the direction of their own government in dealing with our affairs; then all will depend on ourselves alone. That would mean reluctant but necessary and bloody and terrible struggle because I would warn your Ministers that we cannot give up until we have achieved national sovereignty and our equal right among all people. It is therefore a vital and great service that I ask you, dear Brother, because our immediate hope of urgent success will depend on the strength and deliberation of those who oppose our aims. If the Englis continue to turn all their influence and strength against us, and against the Azerbaijani, they will choke the first great breath of our free choice as men. It will never destroy us, but it will be a bitter, hateful, shameful thing, and the Englis will live for ever in our history as despicable wretches who break the spirit of all advancement. That is why we desperately need support among the people and the counsels of your country. So much may depend on it, and so many decisions at Sauj Bulaq will be clearer and simpler if we know that in your country there is an active partisan of the Kurd; a partisan who understands and appreciates the Kurdish struggle for political autonomy and material advancement: a friend and a true brother. Dare I ask more of thee, Englis ?
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James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
“
In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.
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Rodney Stark (Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History)
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Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act. This
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Kirsten Powers (The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech)
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Grant’s personal tragedy was simultaneously an American tragedy. Tormented by his decision, steeped in a meditative mood, Grant reflected on the deep changes wrought in northern Republican circles. He predicted to John Roy Lynch that the northern retreat from Reconstruction would lead to Democrats recapturing power in the South as well as “future mischief of a very serious nature . . . It requires no prophet to foresee that the national government will soon be at a great disadvantage and that the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in a large measure lost . . . What you have just passed through in the state of Mississippi is only the beginning of what is sure to follow. I do not wish to create unnecessary alarm, nor to be looked upon as a prophet of evil, but it is impossible for me to close my eyes in the face of things that are as plain to me as the noonday sun.”105 This wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.
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Ron Chernow (Grant)
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There is no solution for Europe other than deepening the democratic values it invented. It does not need a geographical extension, absurdly drawn out to the ends of the Earth; what it needs is an intensification of its soul, a condensation of its strengths. It is one of the rare places on this planet where something absolutely unprecedented is happening, without its people even knowing it, so much do they take miracles for granted. Beyond imprecation and apology, we have to express our delighted amazement that we live on this continent and not another. Europe, the planet's moral compass, has sobered up after the intoxication of conquest and has acquired a sense of the fragility of human affairs. It has to rediscover its civilizing capabilities, not recover its taste for blood and carnage, chiefly for spiritual advances. But the spirit of penitence must not smother the spirit of resistance. Europe must cherish freedom as its most precious possession and teach it to schoolchildren. It must also celebrate the beauty of discord and divest itself of its sick allergy to confrontation, not be afraid to point out the enemy, and combine firmness with regard to governments and generosity with regard to peoples. In short, it must simply reconnect with the subversive richness of its ideas and the vitality of its founding principles.
Naturally, we will continue to speak the double language of fidelity and rupture, to oscillate between being a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. That is our mental hygiene: we are forced to be both the knife and the wound, the blade that cuts and the hand that heals. The first duty of a democracy is not to ruminate on old evils, it is to relentlessly denounce its present crimes and failures. This requires reciprocity, with everyone applying the same rule. We must have done with the blackmail of culpability, cease to sacrifice ourselves to our persecutors. A policy of friendship cannot be founded on the false principle: we take the opprobrium, you take the forgiveness. Once we have recognized any faults we have, then the prosecution must turn against the accusers and subject them to constant criticism as well. Let us cease to confuse the necessary evaluation of ourselves with moralizing masochism. There comes a time when remorse becomes a second offence that adds to the first without cancelling it. Let us inject in others a poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Tehran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Damascus, Yangon, Harare, and Khartoum, to mention them alone, would do these governments, and especially their people, a lot of good. The fines gift Europe could give the world would be to offer it the spirit of critical examination that it has conceived and that has saved it from so many perils. It is a poisoned gift, but one that is indispensable for the survival of humanity.
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Pascal Bruckner (The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism)
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Economics are as simple as they are not obscured. And as confused as they are made to serve a selfish purpose. Any child can understand—and practice—the basic principles of economics. But grown men, huge with the stature of Government or Chain Banks, find it very useful to obscure the subject beyond all comprehension. The things that are done in the name of 'economic necessity' would shame Satan. For they are done by the selfish few to deny the many. Economics easily evolve into the science of making people miserable. Nine-tenths of life are economic. The remaining one-tenth is social-political. If there is this fruitful source of suppression loose upon the world and if it makes people unhappy, then it is a legitimate field for comment in Scientology as it must form a large 'misunderstood' in our daily lives. Let us see how involved it can be made. If Mankind increases in number and if property and goods increase, then money must also increase unless we are to arrive at a point where none can buy. Yet money is pegged to a metal of which there is just so much and no more—gold. So if Man's expansion is to be checked, it will be checked simply by running out of this metal. And aside from art uses and superstition, the metal, gold, has almost no practical value. Iron is far more useful, but as it is one of the most common elements about, it would not serve the purpose of suppression of Man's growth. MONEY IS SIMPLY A SYMBOL THAT PEOPLE ARE CONFIDENT CAN BE CONVERTED INTO GOODS.
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L. Ron Hubbard
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There are two things going on in the world now. On the one hand, you have dramatic change—people getting very seriously spiritual. A lot of people are dedicating their life now to some spiritual tradition or path. And then on the other hand, you have the lowest side—people killing each other in the cities and being totally uncaring, and all the homeless. You have two polarities. We have people who are changing fast, and then you have a lot of people who never even have a glimpse of the spiritual life. Yes, many people are waking up. But just as many or more are still asleep. It used to be a battle between the young and the old, the so-called generation gap. Now it is a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious. And perhaps, as His Crazy Horse put it, the darkness is afraid of the light. One place where darkness and light polarize is in government, which is a shame since it is supposed to be a source of help and betterment ========== American Indian Prophecies (Kaltreider, Kurt) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1624-1628 | Added on Wednesday, September 10, 2014 6:50:45 PM There are two things going on in the world now. On the one hand, you have dramatic change—people getting very seriously spiritual. A lot of people are dedicating their life now to some spiritual tradition or path. And then on the other hand, you have the lowest side—people killing each other in the cities and being totally uncaring, and all the homeless. You have two polarities. We have people who are changing fast, and then you have a lot of people who never even have a glimpse of the spiritual life.
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Anonymous
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Hong Kong became a British colony after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the result of the Opium War. This was a particularly shameful episode, even by the standards of 19th-century imperialism. The growing British taste for tea had created a huge trade deficit with China. In a desperate attempt to plug the gap, Britain started exporting opium produced in India to China. The mere detail that selling opium was illegal in China could not possibly be allowed to obstruct the noble cause of balancing the books. When a Chinese official seized an illicit cargo of opium in 1841, the British government used it as an excuse to fix the problem once and for all by declaring war. China was heavily defeated in the war and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which made China 'lease' Hong Kong to Britain and give up its right to set its own tariffs.
So there it was-the self-proclaimed leader of the 'liberal' world declaring war on another country because the latter was getting in the way of its illegal trade in narcotics. The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913-the first episode of globalization-was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces. Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or 'unequal treaties' (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3-5%) on them.
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Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism)
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When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God.
Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks; but because the human race is yet too ignorant to penetrate to their true workings. The whole history of progress, as the modern mind sees it, is a history of such penetrations. ... Each in its turn has narrowed the dominion and prerogative of the gods.
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H.L. Mencken
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Needless to say, Mexico carefully controls its own borders. In 2005, it caught and deported nearly a quarter million illegals, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Mexico thinks so little of our border, however, that its soldiers have made hundreds of incursions. In 2008, Edward Tuffy, head of the Border Patrol’s largest union called on President Bush to stop illegal crossings in which Mexican soldiers have threatened and even fired on US agents. On August 3 of that year, four Mexican soldiers crossed the clearly marked border and held a Border Patrol agent at gunpoint. “Time after time they have gotten away with these incursions,” said Mr. Tuffy, “and time after time our government has not taken a forceful stand against them.”
All political factions in Mexico are united in the view that the United States has no right to control its southern border. Felipe Calderon, who succeeded Mr. Fox, unswervingly maintained this policy. During his first state-of-the-nation address in 2007, he won a standing ovation by repeating the traditional government position: “Mexico does not end at its borders,” and, “Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.”
The view that Mexicans have a natural right to enter the United States explains the vitriol that met American discussions in 2006 about ways to stop illegal crossings, and an eventual congressional vote to build a wall along certain parts of the border. President Vicente Fox called the plan for a wall “disgraceful and shameful,” and promised that if it were ever built it would be torn down like the Berlin Wall.
Interior Minister Santiago Creel boasted that “there is no wall that can stop” Mexicans from crossing into the US.
Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez warned that “Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall.” He even said he would ask the United Nations to declare the American plan illegal.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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At first glance, a militant conception of revolution seems more impractical than a nonviolent conception, but this is because it is realistic. People need to understand that capitalism, the state, white supremacy, imperialism, and patriarchy all constitute a war against the people of this planet. And revolution is an intensification of that war. We cannot liberate ourselves and create the worlds we want to live in if we think of fundamental social change as shining a light in the darkness, winning hearts and minds, speaking truth to power, bearing witness, capturing people’s attention, or any other passive parade. Millions of people die every year on this planet for no better reason than a lack of clean drinking water. Because the governments and corporations that have usurped control of the commons have not found a way to profit from those people’s lives, they let them die. Millions of people die every year because a few corporations and their allied governments do not want to allow the production of generic AIDS drugs and other medicine. Do you think the institutions and the elite individuals who hold the power of life or death over millions give a fuck about our protests? They have declared war on us, and we need to take it back to them. Not because we are angry (though we should be), not to get revenge, and not because we are acting impulsively, but because we have weighed the possibility of freedom against the certainty of shame from living under whatever form of domination we are faced with in our particular corner of the globe; because we realize that some people are already fighting, often alone, for their liberation, and that they have a right to and we should support them; and because we understand that the overlapping prisons that entomb our world have by now been so cleverly constructed that the only way to free ourselves is to fight and destroy these prisons and defeat the jailers by whatever means necessary.
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Peter Gelderloos (How Nonviolence Protects the State)
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The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King—and now look at him; an educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his life time. How the experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!
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Mark Twain (Roughing It)
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Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.
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Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
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There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr Gray. All influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view.'
'Why?'
'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion — these are the two things that govern us. And yet —'
'Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy,' said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.
'And yet,' continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that always was so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days, 'I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream — I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal — to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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WHY ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE In its present-day form, the disease model of addiction asserts that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. This disease is evidenced by changes in the brain, especially alterations in the striatum, brought about by the repeated uptake of dopamine in response to drugs and other substances. But it’s also shown by changes in the prefrontal cortex, where regions responsible for cognitive control become partially disconnected from the striatum and sometimes lose a portion of their synapses as the addiction progresses. These are big changes. They can’t be brushed aside. And the disease model is the only coherent model of addiction that actually pays attention to the brain changes reported by hundreds of labs in thousands of scientific articles. It certainly explains the neurobiology of addiction better than the “choice” model and other contenders. It may also have some real clinical utility. It makes sense of the helplessness addicts feel and encourages them to expiate their guilt and shame, by validating their belief that they are unable to get better by themselves. And it seems to account for the incredible persistence of addiction, its proneness to relapse. It even demonstrates why “choice” cannot be the whole answer, because choice is governed by motivation, which is governed by dopamine, and the dopamine system is presumably diseased. Then why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn’t want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That’s true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal, both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain (as I’ve called it). So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function. London just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s got to be Paris. Good food, sex, music . . . they no longer turn your crank. But cocaine sure does.
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Marc Lewis (The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease)
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Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect.
By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.”
The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded:
“It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.”
Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.”
It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history.
This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag.
The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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Speech to the Reichstag Berlin, December 11
Deputies! Men of the German Reichstag! Ever since the rejection of my last peace proposal in July 1940, we have been aware that this war has to be fought to the bitter end. That the Anglo-American, Jewish-capitalist world formed a front with Bolshevism does not come as a surprise to us National Socialists. At home, we found them in the same union, and we succeeded in our struggle at home by defeating our enemies after a sixteen-year-long struggle for power.
When I decided twenty-three years ago to enter politics in order to reverse the decline of the nation, I was a nameless, unknown soldier. Many of you know how difficult the first years of this struggle were. The way from a small movement of seven men to the taking over of responsible government on January 30, 1933, was so miraculous that Providence itself must have made it possible through its blessings.
Today, I head the strongest army in the world, the mightiest air force, and a proud navy. Behind me, I am conscious of the sworn community of the party, which made me great and which became great through me.
The enemies that I confront have been known to be our enemies for over twenty years. Alas, the road that lies ahead of me cannot be compared to the one lying behind me. The German Volk realizes the decisiveness of the hour for its existence. Under the most difficult circumstances, millions of soldiers are obediently and loyally doing their duty.
The American President and his plutocratic clique have called us a people of have nots. That is right! And these have-nots want to live. In any event, they will not allow the owners to rob them of the little that they have to live on. My party comrades, you know my relentless resolve to conclude a struggle victoriously once it has begun. You know my intention not to shy away from anything in such a fight and to break all the resistance that has to be broken.
In my speech on September 1, 1939, I assured you that, in this struggle, neither the force of arms nor time will defeat Germany. I want to assure my enemies that neither will the force of arms nor time defeat us, but neither inner doubts make us falter in the fulfillment of our duty. When we consider the sacrifices of our soldiers, how they risk their lives, then the sacrifices of the homeland become completely insignificant and unimportant. When we think of the numbers of those who, generations before us, fell for the existence and greatness of the German Volk, then we become all the more aware of the greatness of the duty imposed on us.
Whoever seeks to forsake this duty has no right to expect treatment as a Volksgenosse in our midst.
Therefore, no one can expect to live who thinks that he can depreciate the front’s sacrifices at home. Irrespective of the form of disguise for this attempt to disrupt this German front, to undermine this Volk’s willingness to resist, to weaken the authority of this regime, to sabotage the efforts of the homeland, the offender will fall! There will be only one difference: the soldier honorably makes this sacrifice at the front, while the other, who wishes to depreciate this honorable sacrifice, dies in shame.
Our enemies should not deceive themselves. In the two thousand years of the history known to us, our German Volk has never been more unified and united than it is today. The Lord of the Worlds has done so many great things for us in the last years that we bow in gratitude before Providence, which has permitted us to be members of such a great Volk. We thank Him that, in view of past and future generations of the German Volk, we were also allowed to enter our names honorably in the undying book of German history.
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Adolf Hitler
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You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.
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James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
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The military prison at Guantanamo was the equivalent of any concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the most shameful example of the cruel and complete abolition of all human rights by the Government, all in the name of the war on terrorism.
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Kenneth Eade
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Some skeptics assert that there is no other vital energy in the world but physical force, while contrary to their assertions, thousands and tens of thousands who can not possibly be deceived have been quickened into spiritual life by a power neither physical or mental. Men who were dead in sins - drunkards who lost their will, blasphemers who lost their purity, libertines sunk in beastliness, infidels who published their shame to the world, have in numberless instances become the subjects of the Spirit's power and are now walking in the true nobility of Christian manhood, separated by an infinite distance from their former life. Let others reject, if they will, at their own peril, this imperishable truth. I believe, and am growing more into this belief, that divine, miraculous creative power resides in the Holy Ghost. Above and beyond all natural law, yet in harmony with it, creation, providence, the Divine government, and the upbuilding of the Church of God are presided over by the Spirit of God.
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Reuben A. Torrey (The Collected Works of DL Moody - Ten books in one)
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There are only one million of them, the truly evil men, in the whole world. The very rich and the very powerful, whose decisions really count—they only number one million. The stupid men, who number ten million, are the soldiers and policemen who enforce the rule of the evil men. They are the standing armies of twelve key countries, and the police forces of those and twenty more. In total, there are only ten million of them with any real power or consequence. They are often brave, I’m sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down or abandon them, in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.
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Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
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During his first month in office, Trump excluded some prominent reporters from a press briefing. Almost immediately, the government of Cambodia threatened to kick a contingent of American journalists out of its country. Spokesmen in Phnom Penh said they perceived a “clear message” from Trump that “news broadcast by those media outlets does not reflect the truth,” adding that “Freedom of expression . . . must respect the state’s power.” Cambodia’s was the first of many governments—others include those of Hungary, Libya, Poland, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand—to insist that negative stories about them are false for no reason except that the press cannot be trusted. According to the People’s Daily, the house organ of the Chinese Communist Party: “If the president of the United States claims that his nation’s media outlets are a stain on America, then negative stories about China should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is likely that the bias and political agenda are distorting the real picture.” The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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My client’s infancy was characterized by a lack of touching and holding. She was schedule fed and was left alone for long periods of time during which she cried endlessly and experienced great fear. This information was given her by her two favorite aunts who were living in the same household with her. My client experienced a “being shame bind.” She was what I’ll refer to in the next chapter as a “Lost Child.” She was never told she was unwanted or that her mother was enraged at her for her very existence, but she felt it and knew it with the intelligence that governs affects in the nondominant hemisphere of the brain.
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John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame That Binds You)
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It's the knowledge I spit that's detrimental to those powerful. Mental elemental procedures to the mass of ignorance. It's an on-going, never-ending symbol of punishment for the suffering is due to its lack of acknowledgement. Masquerades, gimmicks, and monopoly games; giving your heart to this money instead of Almighty, so it's suffering and burning of flames, a burning of shame.
Playing the game can never leave you the same so who is to blame? Complete conspiracy, committed theft of inherited immunity, live a life of misery and taxing our energy. A straw afloat on water of deceptive ingenuity. A false replica of me, an enemy with my name but non-resistant so I agree with my adversary.
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Jose R. Coronado (The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey)