Linda

“Public interest has been subordinated to private interest, and when there is no clear distinction between them, it opens the door to endless opportunities for corruption.”48”
― Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

“The most recent estimate is that a mere 400 individuals in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans taken together -- a degree of wealth concentration that is accurately, not rhetorically, properly designated medieval.”
― Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution

“Inside the KGB offices, staff members were busy burning all the files. Putin later stated, “We burned so much stuff that the furnace exploded.”46 He recounts that despite the local office’s efforts to get the Soviet military to come to their rescue, and in general to defend their positions in East Germany, “Moscow was silent. . . . I only really regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls . . . cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away. . . . We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.”
― Karen Dawisha, Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Alan Alda