#my

Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem—unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and ani­mals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect. ↗

— David Graeber

#market #soldiers #family

I love God, Jesus Christ, my three children, mother, father, brother, sisters, family in general, my pets, my students, and true friends. ↗

— Ana Monnar

#family-in-general #father #god #jesus-christ #love

We ran on the fuel of youth and hormones and ignorant arrogance, imagining we had the whole world and the workings thereof figured out. ↗

— Gwenn Wright

#mystery #suspense #thriller #von-strassenberg #william-drexler-the-third

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany. Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking. ↗

— Jesse Cozean

#jesse-cozean #memoir #my-grandfather-s-war #patton #world-war-ii

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution. ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#poverty #food

If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#food #my-ishmael #philosophy #food

Freedom carries sacrifice, ↗

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#my #own #freedom

The negative penalties of the Old Testament case laws were not harsh but just, not a threat to society but rather the necessary judicial foundation of civic freedom… the Old Testament was harsh on criminals because it was soft on victims. ↗

— Gary North

#law #reconstructionism #society #theonomy #freedom

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#autonomy #freedom #laws #liberty #rebellion

Luxury as beauty" has nothing to do with a particular place or an object's price tag. It is seeing with eyes for beauty. Once we cut the automatic but learned connection between buying stuff and pleasure, we can actively cultivate new connections - a sense of freedom as we shed draining habits and discover new pleasures in seeing and creating beauty all around us. ↗

— Frances Moore Lappé

#economy #environmentalism #beauty