Browsing PBH By Quotes

Our Obligation To Humanity

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice…

Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

From Julian Assange’s now defunct blog at IQ.org

A Creature Of Questionable Content

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

– From Araby by James Joyce

Continue Reading

A Tale Of Two Ghettos

Antisemitism used to refer to people who hate Jews. Now it refers to people Jews hate.

— Redditor OllieGarkee on the story of AdBusters being removed from a national grocery chain in Canada after published side-by-side photographs of the Gaza and Warsaw Ghetto’s

Truth On September 12th, 2001

The rising debt, poverty, and disease in the south are beginning to reach deep into rich countries in the north. We can no longer turn our backs on this misery. If we dislike humanitarian reasons for addressing these issues, we should at least be motivated by self-interest…

The attacks are a language of last resort: the oppressed and persecuted have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to translate the meaning. So a few have taken the personal responsibility to speak in a language that needs no translation.

From A message from the global south by Saskia Sassen

One Nation, Under Profit

Do you vote?

I often do, without much enthusiasm. In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

— Noam Chomsky, in an interview with the New Statesman