But it scarcely matters who actually signed the sentence–in those years everybody readily signed whatever was put before them. This was not only because they feared they would otherwise at once be dispatched to the…
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…
“People ignore reality in favor of their bright ideas.” –Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 1965, quoted in Susie Linfield, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky
Our legacy is Jesus and the saints. –Daniel Berrigan, S.J., The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power
Dogmatism buckles under pressure from reality. –Nellie Bowles, “The Failure of San Francisco,” in Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History
During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and…
Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to…
The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…
[Nikolay] Valentinov … recorded his shock at Lenin’s certainty not only that Marx and Engels were absolutely correct, but that no fundamental principle they enunciated, about anything, could ever be changed. “Nothing in Marxism is…