“No one owns anyone’s culture, and that to believe otherwise is to deprive us of the human fullness and richness we all deserve. To reconcile this insight with an equally compelling American truth—that racial injustice is our inheritance and our responsibility—is the challenge for every artist and critic, black or white.” – George Packer, “Race, Art, and Essentialism”
“Girls, never trust a man under 40, because he’s still a boy.” – John Mellencamp (interviewed by Edna Gundersen in AARP The Magazine)
“To obtain the right training for virtue from youth up is difficult, unless one has been brought up under the right laws. To live a life of self-control and tenacity is not pleasant for most people, especially for the young. Therefore, their upbringing and pursuits must be regulated by laws; for once they have become familiar, they will no longer be painful. But it is perhaps not enough that they receive the right upbringing and attention only in their youth. Since they must carry on these pursuits and cultivate them by habit when they have grown up, we probably need laws for this, too, and for the whole of life in general. For most people are swayed rather by compulsion that argument, and by punishment rather than by a sense of what is noble. This is why some believe that lawgivers ought to exhort and try to influence people toward a life of virtue because of its inherent nobility, in the hope that those who have made good progress through their habits will listen to them. Chastisement and penalties, they think, should be imposed upon those who do not obey and are of an inferior nature, while the incorrigible ought to be banished abroad. A good man, they think, who orients his life by what is noble will accept the guidance of reason, while a bad man, whose desire is for pleasure, is corrected by pain like a beast of burden. For the same reason, they say that the pains inflicted must be those that are most directly opposed to the pleasures he loves.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, Ch. 9
“Some people believe that it is nature that makes men good, others that it is habit, and others again that it is teaching. Now, whatever goodness comes from nature is obviously not in our power, but is present in truly fortunate men as the result of some divine cause. Argument and teaching, I am afraid, are not effective in all cases: the soul of the listener must first have been conditioned by habits to the right kind of likes and dislikes, just as land must be cultivated before it is able to foster the seed. For a man whose life is guided by emotion will not listen to an argument that dissuades him, nor will he understand it. How can we possibly persuade a man like that to change his ways? And in general it seems that emotion does not yield to argument but only to force. Therefore, there must first be a character that somehow has an affinity for excellence or virtue, a character that loves what is noble and feels disgust at what is base.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, Ch. 9
“The natural tendency of most people is to be swayed not by a sense of shame but by fear, and to refrain from acting basely not because it is disgraceful, but because of the punishment it brings. Living under the sway of emotion, they pursue their own proper pleasures and the means by which they can obtain them, and they avoid the pains that are opposed to them. But they do not even have a notion of what is noble and truly pleasant, since they have never tasted it. What argument indeed can transform people like that? To change by argument what has long been ingrained in a character is impossible or, at least, not easy. Perhaps we must be satisfied if we have whatever we think it takes to become good an attain a modicum of excellence.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, Ch. 9
“Pleasure is considered to be deeply ingrained in the human race, and that is why in educating the young we use pleasure and pain as rudders with which to steer them straight. Moreover, to like and to dislike what one should is thought to be of greatest importance in developing excellence of character. For in view of the fact that people choose the pleasant and avoid the painful, pleasure and pain pervade the whole of life and have the capacity of exerting a decisive influence for a life of excellence or virtue and happiness.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, Ch. 1
“Ought we to make as many friends as possible? Or will the mot juste about hospitality, ‘not too many guests, nor yet none,’ also fit friendship in the sense that a person should neither be friendless nor have an excessive number of friends? The saying would seem to fit exactly those who become friends with a view to their mutual usefulness. To accommodate many people in return for what they have done to us is troublesome, and life is not long enough to do that. Accordingly, more friends than are sufficient for one’s own life are superfluous and are an obstacle to the good life, so that there is no need of them. To give us pleasure a few friends are sufficient.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, Ch. 10
“In a way, anger seems to listen to reason, but to hear wrong, like hasty servants, who run off before they have heard everything their master tells them, and fail to do what they were ordered, or like dogs, which bark as soon as there is a knock without waiting to see if the visitor is a friend.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7, Ch. 6
“Justice is a sort of mean, not in the same way as the other virtues are, but in that it is realized in a median amount, while injustice belongs to the extremes.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 5, Ch. 5
“Evil destroys even itself, and when it is present in its entirety it becomes unbearable.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, Ch. 5
“Only a worthless man would endure utter disgrace for no good or reasonable purpose.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3, Ch. 1
“Both virtue and art are always concerned with what is harder, for success is better when it is hard to achieve.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Ch. 3
“In our transactions with other men it is by action that some become just and others unjust, and it is by acting in the face of danger and by developing the habit of feeling fear or cowardice that some become brave men and others cowards. The same applies to the appetites and feelings of anger: by reacting in one way or in another to given circumstances some people become self-controlled and gentle, and others self-indulgent and short-tempered. In a word, characteristics develop from corresponding activities. For that reason, we must see to it that our activities are of a certain kind, since any variations in them will be reflected in our characteristics. Hence it is no small matter whether one habit or another in inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Ch. 1
“He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly useless.” – Hesiod, Works and Days (trans. Richmond Lattimore)
“If you put lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig.” – Jeffrey J. Kroll, “Cross Is More Fun, but Direct Is What Wins”
“Fueled by self-love, the I is at its most garrulous inside its lonely garage.” – Will Schutt, “Storm”
“Marriage is the tomb of love.” – Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, Memoirs
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E. L. Doctorow
“How do people come to know themselves? One way is by reading fiction. The profound act of empathy demanded by a novel, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief and embody a stranger’s skin, prompts reflection and self-questioning. But most people don’t read novels.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” – James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”
“A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled. Without this passion we may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us from each other and separate us from ourselves.” – James Baldwin, “Preservation of Innocence”
“In good fiction, as in real life, there tend not to be sentimental heroes and cruel villains but only deeply compromised human beings who struggle with their sins and shortcomings as best they can.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.” – James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”
“Police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents but outbreaks of a chronic national disease.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.” – James Baldwin (quoted by Nathaniel Rich in “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”)
“Refugee camps provide food and shelter, but they do not provide political voice and agency for their populations. Global institutions do not have the power to include stateless people in political membership. This is the danger of cosmopolitan institutions—that everyone becomes a mere human body to be managed in a camp.” – Thomas Nail, “Migrant Cosmpolitanism”
“If it were in my power to change the mercantile laws of literary society, I could easily spin out my existence writing and rewriting the same story in the hope that I might end up understanding it and making it clear to others.” – Ignazio Silone (quoted by Dorothy Day in The Catholic Worker, January 1968)
“If we value democracy, if we want to live in a world marked by a vibrant public sphere that can generate the possibilities of hope and human betterment, then we need futures. Without futures, and without serious propositional clashes between different materialized futures, we have no politics, and we have no democracy. We merely have millimetric policy disputes that end up as the technocratic attending to marginally different versions of the status quo.
“We can sense these dangers at the moment when we look at the state of our increasingly illiberal democracies. The problems mount: from climate change to spiraling inequality; from crumbling infrastructure to a surveillance state that has no bounds. Yet, our political culture is fixed and frozen.
“As such, we find ourselves in a culture that can happily spend $250 million dollars per Hollywood movie to create the next sci-fi fantasy but finds it is beyond its imaginative capacities to design superb, sustainable, public housing. We can build fabulously elaborate multiplayer online fantasy games, where gamer avatars can have sex with their elf girlfriends, but providing web platforms that give working people more democratic control over their workplace is a fantasy too far. The potential of self-driving cars or the rise of Artificial Intelligence can be endlessly debated. But the idea that we might be able to regulate our financial institutions is presented as a process as mysterious, dangerous and futile as the attempt to locate Lord Voldermort’s horcruxes.
“Yes, there are future visions still engaged with in mainstream political debate. But what are they: The endless continuation of the neo-liberal present; apocalyptic modes of environmentalism; dystopian fears of the return of the caliphate. We can do much better than that.” – Damian White, “Critical Design and the Critical Social Sciences”
“Forget about the level of training, the implementation of draconian punitive measures or the socialization of troops – during any engagement both sides are naturally leaning towards retreat. The side whose soldiers are able to suppress that instinctive response longer is usually victorious.” – Łukasz Różycki, “Fear – Elements of Slavic ‘Psychological Warfare’ in the Context of Selected Late Roman Sources”