Thomas > Thomas's Quotes

“have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world. —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“I know the South claims that it has spent millions for the education of the blacks, and that it has of its own free will shouldered this awful burden. It seems to be forgetful of the fact that these millions have been taken from the public tax funds for education, and that the law of political economy which recognizes the land owner as the one who really pays the taxes is not tenable. It would be just as reasonable for the relatively few land owners of Manhattan to complain that they had to stand the financial burden of the education of the thousands and thousands of children whose parents pay rent for tenements and flats. Let the millions of producing and consuming Negroes be taken out of the South, and it would be quickly seen how much less of public funds there would be to appropriate for education or any other purpose.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“With the rest of my generation, I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.”15”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“[The citizens supporting democracy in the civil war in the city-state of Corcyra] captured and executed all their enemies whom they could find. . . . They then proceeded to the sanctuary of Hera and persuaded about fifty of the suppliants [from the opposing faction] who had sought sacred refuge there to agree to appear in court. The democrats thereupon condemned every last one of the erstwhile suppliants to death. When the other suppliants who had refused to go to trial comprehended what was going on, most of them killed each other right there in the sanctuary. Some hanged themselves from trees, while others found a variety of ways to commit suicide. [For a week] the members of the democratic faction went on slaughtering any fellow citizens whom they thought of as their enemies. They accused their victims of plotting to overthrow the democracy, but in truth they killed many people simply out of personal hatred or because they owed money to the victims. Death came in every way and fashion. And, as customarily occurs in such situations, the killers went to every extreme and beyond. There were fathers who murdered their sons; men were dragged out of the temples to be put to death or simply butchered on the very altars of the gods; some people were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysus and left there to die [of starvation].”
― Thomas R. Martin, Ancient Greece

“In The Acharnians of 425 B.C., for example, the protagonist arranges a separate peace treaty with the Spartans for himself and his family while humiliating a character who portrays one of Athens’s prominent military commanders of the time. In other words, the triumphant hero in this play was a traitor who got away with betraying Athens. The play won first prize in competition for comedies that year, a fact that underlines the strength of the freedom of public speech in Classical Age Athens and suggests just how much many citizens yearned to end the war and return to “normal” life.”
― Thomas R. Martin, Ancient Greece

“Plato presents Socrates as not using his remarks to rebut all the charges or to try to curry favor or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected defendants to do in serious cases like this one. Instead, he bluntly reiterated his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their preconceptions. The unexamined life, he famously stated, was not worth living. His irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help his fellow citizens learn to live lives of excellence, and he would never stop doing that, no matter what penalty he might experience as a result. Furthermore, they should care not about their material possessions but about making their true selves—their souls—as good as possible. Nothing else should take priority. If he were to be acquitted, he baldly stated, he vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to himself.”
― Thomas R. Martin, Ancient Greece

“Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“The activists also had instructions to return, to surprise people in order to catch them unaware and with their food unguarded. In many places the brigades came more than once. Families were searched, and then searched again to make sure that nothing remained. “They came three times,” one woman remembered, “until there was nothing left. Then they stopped coming.”17 Brigades sometimes arrived at different times of day or night, determined to catch whoever had food red-handed.18 If it happened that a family was eating a meagre dinner, the activists sometimes took bread off the table.19 If it happened that soup was cooking, they pulled it off the stove and tossed out the contents. Then they demanded to know how it was possible the family still had something to put in the soup.20 People who seemed able to eat were searched with special vigour; those who weren’t starving were by definition suspicious. One survivor remembered that her family had once managed to get hold of some flour and used it to bake bread during the night. Their home was instantly visited by a brigade that had detected the noise and sounds of cooking in the house. They entered by force and grabbed the bread directly out of the oven.21 Another survivor described how the brigade “watched chimneys from a hill: when they saw smoke, they went to that house and took whatever was being cooked.”22 Yet another family received a parcel from a relative containing rice, sugar, millet and shoes. A few hours later a brigade arrived and took everything except the shoes.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“Trump gave some private advice to a friend who had acknowledged some bad behavior toward women. Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied. There is no choice. “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” he said. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. That was a big mistake you made. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“Coming back from the G20 summit, Trump was editing an upcoming speech with Porter. Scribbling his thoughts in neat, clean penmanship, the president wrote, “TRADE IS BAD.” Though he never said it in a speech, he had finally found the summarizing phrase and truest expression of his protectionism, isolationism and fervent American nationalism.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“Trump defended what he had said. “It’s not as if one side has any sort of [monopoly] on hatred or on bigotry. It’s not as if any one group is at fault or anything like that. With the media, you’re never going to get a fair shake. Anything that you say or do is going to be criticized.” “You need to fix this,” Porter argued. “You don’t want to be perceived the way in which you’re being perceived now. You need to bring the country together.” That was the moral obligation. “There’s no upside to not directly condemn neo-Nazis and those that are motivated by racial animus. There is a huge rift in the country.” Porter played heavily to the president’s ego and desire to be at the center. He said that the president could be a kind of healer in chief, consoler in chief. “The country is counting on you rhetorically to help salve the wounds and point a direction forward,” Porter said. The president could inspire and uplift. He could make this about him, the redeemer. Trump did not push back but he didn’t say yes.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“The Middle Kingdom was the golden age of literature, when many of the great classics were composed. From the heroic Tale of Sinuhe to the rollicking yarn of The Shipwrecked Sailor, from the overtly propagandist Prophecies of Neferti to the subtle rhetoric of The Eloquent Peasant, and from the metaphysical Dispute Between a Man and His Soul to the burlesque Satire of the Trades, the literary output of the Middle Kingdom reveals ancient Egyptian society at its most complex and sophisticated”
― Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

“The ideology of kingship required—demanded—a male ruler. Yet Hatshepsut, as her very name announced, was female. Her response to this conundrum was deeply schizophrenic. On some monuments, especially those dating from the time before her accession, she had the images recarved to show her as a man. On others, she had female epithets applied to male monarchs of the past, in an apparent attempt to “feminize” her ancestors. Even when portrayed as a man, Hatshepsut often used grammatically feminine epithets, describing herself as the daughter (rather than son) of Ra, or the lady (rather than lord) of the Two Lands. The tension between male office and female officeholder was never satisfactorily resolved. Little wonder that Hatshepsut’s advisers came up with a new circumlocution for the monarch. From now on, the term for the palace, per-aa (literally “great house”), was applied also to its chief inhabitant. Peraa—pharaoh—now became the unique designation of the Egyptian ruler.”
― Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

“Richard Stouthamer discovered a group of asexual, all-female wasps, which only reproduced by cloning themselves. This trait was the work of a bacterium, Wolbachia: when Stouthamer treated the wasps with antibiotics, the males suddenly reappeared and both sexes started mating again. Thierry Rigaud found bacteria in woodlice that transformed males into females by interfering with the production of male hormones; it was Wolbachia, too. In Fiji and Samoa, Greg Hurst found that a bacterium was killing the male embryos of the magnificent blue-moon butterfly, so that the females outnumbered the males by a hundred to one. Again: Wolbachia. Maybe not exactly the same strain, but all were different versions of the microbe from Hertig and Wolbach’s mosquito.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“The weaponization of this fearsome phantasm of “gender” is authoritarian at its core. Rolling back progressive legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the reactive moment in this scene. The project of restoring the world to a time before “gender” promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never have existed but that occupies the place of “history” or “nature”—an order that only a strong state can restore.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“It seems we are not in a public debate at all, precisely because there is no text in the room, no agreement on terms, and fear and hatred have flooded the landscape where critical thought should be thriving.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?