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The horse-breaking story reflects the attributes of the Virginia gentleman: it is mainly to take risks; but when things go wrong you admit responsibility and accept the consequences. The ideal mam has pride, willfulness, boisterous passions — all contained and controlled.

The force of his commands makes it clear that within his own family Washington was entirely alone in his thinking about slavery. He expected that the emancipation would come as a shock to his family and, moreover, he expected them to resist it. Washington was positioning himself as the protector of his slaves.

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is over-run with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her - Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! Receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruetly of the monster.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.

And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

The American experiment had not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders.

King, indicted for violating the state's antiboycott law, said, "If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them."

Even the most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spreads of creeds which, claiming the priviledge of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.

When Walter Lippmann turned thirty-two, he wrote a book called "Public Opinion", in which he concluded...the masses...had been asked to do too much...Mass democracy can't work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion - especially mass advertising - meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.

"My dear young friends," Douglass closed. "Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress and you will reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety."

American slavery had lasted for centuries. It had stolen the lives of millions and crushed the souls of millions more. It had cut down children, stricken mothers, and broken men. It had poisoned a people and a nation. It had turned hearts to stone. It had made eyes blind. It had left gaping wounds and terrible scars. It was not over yet. But at last, at last, an end lay within sight.

Theodore Parker, a thirty-six-year-old Unitarian minister who had just returned from a tour of Europe, called on Americans to abolish slavery and disavow conquest. "Abroad we are looked on as a nation of swindlers and men-stealers!" he cried. "And what can we say in our defense? Alas, the nation is a traitor to its great idea - that all men are born equal, each with the same inalienable rights."

The United States was not founded as Christian nation. The constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be "to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits."

He considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. "The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained," he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold "counterfeit" opinions by persuasive men.

Writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette, he offered an attack on slavery, signing his essay "Hisoricus - the voice of history." He died two weeks later. He was the only man to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His last public act was to urge abolition. Congress would not hear of it.

It became commonplace, inevitable, even, first among the Spanish, and then, in turn, among the French, the Dutch, and the English, to see their own prosperity and good health and the terrible sickness suffered by the natives as signs from God..."it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples."...""the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess."

The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

Friedman's cycle of public opinion and durable law now revert to us: it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning... The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, "No more!"

Public spaces to act on that will. What is at stake is the dominant principle of social ordering is an information civilization and our rights as individuals and societies to answer the questions Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?

If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. In this I do not mean only our "personal information." What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one's own life and authorship of one's own experience. What is at stake is the inward experıence trom which we form the will to will and the public-

Glass life is intolerable, but so is fitting our faces with masks and draping our bodies in digitally resistant fabrics to thwart the ubiquitous lawless machines. Like every counter-declaration, hiding risks becomes an adaptation when it should be a rallying point for outrage. These conditions are unacceptable. Tunnels under this wall are not enough. This wall must come down.

Continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and authority capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue power.

Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the "others," especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion.

The aim is the automation of society through tuning, herding, and conditioning people to produce preselected behaviors judged as desirable by the state and thus able to "preempt instability," as one strategic studies expert put it.

The rise of instrumentarianism power...grows through declaration, self-authorization, rhetorical misdirection, euphemism, and the quiet, audacious backstage moves specifically crafted to elude awareness as it replaces individual freedom with others knowledge and replaces society with certainty. It does not confront democracy but rather erodes it from within...

At no other time in historyhave private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.

Writing in the Guardian, psychology professor Chris Chambers summarized that "the Facebook study paints a dystopian future in which academic researchers escape ethical restriction by teaming up with private companies to test increasingly dangerous or harmful interventions.

What happens to my will to will myself into the first person when the surrounding market cosmos disguises itself as my mirror, shape-shifting according to what it has decided I feel or felt or will feel: ignoring, goading, chiding, cheering, or punishing me?

In his last recorded speech Pericles enumerated the characteristics necessary in a statesman: "To know what must be done and to be able to explain it; to love one's country and to be incorruptible" (2.60.5). No one had these traits in greater measure than Pericles himself, and if he made errors, he of all the Athenians was most likely to put them right. His countrymen would miss him sorely.