#tate

Being in the building with Sarah Palin that night is a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It’s a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. ↗

— Matt Taibbi

#politics #sarah-palin #united-states #experience

I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism. These are historical facts that cannot be altered. ↗

— Moshe Sharett

#cannot #deceit #facts #generation #historical

Free education, almost free healthcare, a generous benefits system and a better state pension than elsewhere, guarantee equal opportunities for all citizens. The only problem is that all these require a considerable amount of public revenue. This is why the common assertion that to be born in Finland is like winning the jackpot in the lottery is only applicable when you are at the receiving end. A far more common experience is that you need to win the lottery just to cover the tax bill. ↗

— Tarja Moles

#taxation #welfare #welfare-state #education

What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#toleration #business

The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various individuals’, or groups of individuals’, experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their “pursuit of happiness” to outright obliterating it. ↗

— Aberjhani

#demographics-of-united-states #diversity #equality #freedom #george-zimmerman

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#history #thomas-jefferson #united-states #faith

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side. ↗

— Andrew Coyle Bradley

#calamity #called #clearly #considered #death

Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (...) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit. ↗

— Ruth Benedict

#japan #materialism #spirit #united-states #victory

A prosperous state makes a secure Christian, but adversity makes him Consider. ↗

— Anne Bradstreet

#christian #consider #him #makes #prosperous

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fairies #hero-worship #john-f-kennedy #kennedy-family #politics