#pol

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99 ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #conservative #corruption #government #plato

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not. ↗

— Judith Martin

#believe #between #come #conservatives #country

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence ↗

— Linda Grant

#politics #death

Assim é, mas a vantagem da igreja é que, embora às vezes o não pareça, ao gerir o que está no alto, governa o que está em baixo. ↗

— José Saramago

#religion #death

...British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine. ↗

— Sol Stern

#israel #jewish #middle-east #political #death

Life would be much simpler if men could fuck themselves, don't you agree? ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#life

Con los ojos fijos en Napoleón pensaba en la insignificancia de la grandeza, en la insignificancia de la vida cuyo objeto nadie comprendía, en la insignificancia mayor aún de la muerte cuyo sentido permanecía oculto e impenetrable a los humanos ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#life #muerte #napoleon #vida #death

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34 ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#common-law #fairness #government #law #politics

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures) ↗

— Geertz Clifford

#linguistics #communication

Anyone who has lived here for long enough has seen it all before: opposing sides of the political spectrum ferociously criticising each other, getting hot under the collar about this and that, bringing up all sorts of allegations and innuendos. Then just as it looks as if the argument is about to get physical, harmony breaks out. A dialogue is opened, an accord or a compromise is found. And suddenly, just as quickly as it came, all that fiery rhetoric subsides and everyone realizes it was all synthetic, put on for show when all along some deal was imminent anyway. It's as if every politician is merely an actor in a little theatre, and as soon as the curtain falls and the public can't see them any more they all slap each other on the back, tot up the takings and go out for an expensive meal. ↗

— Tobias Jones

#death