RJHall’s Profile

“Nothing eases suffering like human touch.”
― Bobby Fischer, Chess Meets of the Century

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ...
And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.
....
Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks

“Happiness is an illusion, Natalie. It doesn't actually exist."

"Of course it does," I said. "It's what you feel when you're not sad."

"That's unconsciousness. And I'm pretty sure that I'm miserable when I am unconscious, too.”
― Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk on the Couch