Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

"For those to whom Mao remains relevant, his noble, impractical vision, undimmed by time, redeems all his other transgressions and follies." Lowell Dittmer

"The team did not do well but Carty did, hitting home runs over center field the way he had learned on the streets and making a spectacular throw to home plate off the right field fence. Everyone wanted to sign this Dominican kid with the perfect swing, the powerful throwing arm, the tall, lean, and muscular body, and the strikingly sculpted face."

"The new spirit manifested itself in all kinds of compositions and his themes tended to be mysterious, not only in the figures represented, but also in the relationship between the apparent significance and the hidden meaning which we believe them to conceal."

"Since Jung Chang was a Red Guard…she is familiar with this form…But why Halliday has chosen to pick up a neo-Stalinist denunciatory narrative to write for an English-reading audience is beyond my kin. Chang and Halliday's Maoist denunciation of Mao…is not history; it is propaganda."

"Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to the one sentence, 'It is right to rebel.' For thousands of years, it had been said that it was right to oppress, and it was right to exploit, and it was wrong to rebel. This old verdict was only reversed with the appearance of Marxism… And from this truth there follows resistance, struggle, the fight for socialism."

"What is bad is often not at all is. Injurious or dangerous to the ego; On the contrary, it may be something which is desirable or enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, there is an extraneous influence at work, and that if desires what is to be called good or bad."

"Something is really wrong with me. And I don't know why it is. Love always, Charlie"

"Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run 'Love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee', I should not take exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is 'Love thine enemies'. If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing."

"Nor should we forget that, in spite of the depreciation of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in Europe people's among whom the strong genital odours which are so repellent to us are highly prized as sexual stimulants and who refuse to give them up."

"The most remarkable example of such a process is found in the anal eroticism of young human beings. Their original interest in the excretory function…changed…into…a sense of order and cleanliness…intensified till they become markedly dominant and produce what is called the anal character."

"(P)ut the study of party history on to a scientific Bolshevik basis and to sharpen vigilance against Trotskyist and all other falsifiers of the history of our party." Joseph Stalin

"All is in vain: the soul is blinded, We are destined for the worms and maggots, And not even the ashes remain In the land of Russian justice." Zinaida Gippius

"The first question that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror."

Bolshevik: Comes the Revolution, we'll all have strawberries in our sour cream. Socialist: But I don't like strawberries in my sour cream. Bolshevik: Comes the Revolution, you'll like strawberries in your sour cream!

"I believe I'm one of the least machista men in the world and one of the most authentically feminist." Pedro Almodóvar

"Not a single great revolution in history has take place without civil war." Vladimir Lenin, September 1917

"The Soviets are the most perfect representatives of the people-perfect in their revolutionary experience, in their idea and objects…they are the backbone of the Revolution." Leon Trotsky, 1917

"But these were superstitious times, and there was a nagging question: Was Rasputin a man who could be killed?"

"A war between Austria and Russia would be a most useful thing for the revolution…" Lenin in a 1914 letter to Maxim Gorky

"Their view of Mao is not much less prejudiced and distorted than Beijing's official line, though it lies at the other end of the spectrum." Gregor Benton and Steve Tsang

"The issues of domestic abuse of women finds its outspoken masterpiece in Once Were Warriors (1994), directed with a strong hand by Lee Tamahori (b. 1950), a former graphic artist."

"You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves." Joseph Stalin

"It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters." Freud

"We joked that unrequited, or in this case unconsummated, live affairs are the only ones that last forever. It seemed as though her longing was not so much for her ex-boyfriend as for the innocence of her early self."