Jason > Jason's Quotes

“We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggeration are often catastrophic. Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last several centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Spanish observers reported a traditional practice: that on the death of a Calusa ruler, or of his principal wife, a certain quota of their subjects’ sons and daughters had to be put to death. By most definitions, all this would make Carlos not just a king, but a sacred king, perhaps divine.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Seen one way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being.36”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“(‘all in all, you’re just another jade in the wall’).”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.63”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Major landowners, military commanders, priests, administrators and other senior government officials also held titles like ‘Keeper of the King’s Secrets’, ‘Beloved Acquaintance of the King’, ‘Director of Music to the Pharaoh’, ‘Overseer of the Palace Manicurists’ or even ‘of the King’s Breakfast’.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“A performance by Richard Mansfield in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde left Harry so shaken he was afraid to go home alone.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“If they confess that there is the slightest chance that Mr. Roosevelt may die or become incapacitated in the next four years, they are faced with the grinning skeleton of Truman the bankrupt, Truman the pliant tool of Boss Pendergast in looting Kansas City’s county government, Truman the yes-man and apologist in the Senate for political gangsters.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“Truman had little use for the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt, who had liked the way Hoover got results and greatly enjoyed the spicy secrets Hoover passed on to him about the private lives of important people. It had been Roosevelt, in 1936, who had quietly ordered Hoover to begin gathering political information, a policy Truman strongly disliked. Truman considered Hoover and the FBI a direct threat to civil liberties, and he made no effort now, as Roosevelt had, to ingratiate himself with Hoover—as Hoover saw at once and found infuriating.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after,” Stalin said, as he idly doodled wolves’ heads with a red pencil.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“Truman had written to his mother and sister. “She’s one nice girl,” he told them in another letter, “and I’m so glad she hasn’t turned out like Alice Roosevelt and a couple of the Wilson daughters.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“They [the Republicans] did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person. . . . Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“It was so cold inside the tent that for the first few minutes the audience was shrouded in a cloud of its own breath.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them,” the Spanish academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“For me, the other compelling thread, which dates back to my college days in the 1980s, has been my growing recognition that liberalism—the political ideology I was raised in and still am most generally attracted to—has a serious elitism problem that needs correcting.”
― Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

“Especially troubling for me is the research that finds that liberal communities actually engage in higher rates of exclusionary zoning than conservative ones.”
― Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

“Education has long been viewed in American society as “the great equalizer.” But in practice, American schools are highly segregated by race and socioeconomic status, which defeats the equality goal. Research dating back five decades shows one of the most powerful ways to improve the life chances of disadvantaged students is giving them the opportunity to attend high-quality schools that educate rich and poor students under a single roof.135”
― Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

“Low-income students stuck in schools located in high-poverty areas are surrounded by peers who, because they have had less opportunity, are typically less academically engaged and more likely to act out than those in schools in higher-income neighborhoods.”
― Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

“And the rejection of white working-class voters as desirable partners betrays an ugly elitism that is at odds with what Democrats are supposed to stand for. The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton described half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”84 Although Clinton was certainly right to denounce racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes as deplorable, her comments were troubling on several levels. She changed what is normally an adjective into a noun, suggesting that white working-class people with less education than her were completely defined by their attitudes on race. Clinton used the line while speaking to audiences whom she described as “successful people” at fundraisers in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, where her audiences knowingly chuckled at America’s benighted white working class.85 And it did not go unnoticed, one journalist remarked, that deplorables is not a term Clinton ever applied to highly educated Wall Street bankers who brought about the Great Recession and threw millions of people out of work.86 In”
― Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

“I am for such a League provided we don’t expect too much from it…. I am not willing to play the part which even Aesop held up to derision when he wrote of how the wolves and the sheep agreed to disarm, and how the sheep as a guarantee of good faith sent away the watchdogs, and were then forthwith eaten by the wolves.”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

“Things which ought to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary pronouncements….”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

“The businessmen who helped Hitler into power naïvely believed that they were only supporting a dictator, and one of their own making, who would naturally rule to the advantage of their own class and the disadvantage of all others.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism