#nit

The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be? ↗

— Glenn Greenwald

#iraq-war #poverty #terrorism #united-states #war

A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war. ↗

— Glenn Greenwald

#governance #iraq-war #lyndon-b-johnson #politics #united-states

Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome. ↗

— Ian Buruma

#bigotry #cold-war #leftism #politics #united-states

In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve. ↗

— Stefan Collini

#education-system #humanities #education

First sign of madness, talking to your own head. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#madness #talking

It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal. ↗

— John Paul II

#christianity #jesus-christ #beauty

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit... ↗

— David Sedaris

#shit #swearing #tofu #desire

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next. ↗

— Nicholas Kristof

#generations #inequality #inequity #opportunity #united-states

I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#unity #community

All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall. ↗

— Alexandre Dumas

#unity #unity