"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world. Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign correspondent
“Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.”
― C. JoyBell C.
@JTT,
“Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.”
― Lemony Snicket
@vonny,
"Your awkwardness excites me, my dear."
Frank Harris.
@spendius,
Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.
― Francis Chan
"Trifling trouble find utterance; deeply felt pangs are silent"
- Seneca
"You save a penny here, a quarter there, a nickel the other place and pretty soon you have 31 cents to your name."
-- A nameless friend in conversation this morning
@Lustig Andrei,
I like video games, but they are very violent. I want to create a video game in which you have to help all the characters who have died in the other games. 'Hey, man, what are you playing?' 'Super Busy Hospital. Could you leave me alone? I'm performing surgery! This guy got shot in the head, like, 27 times!'
- Demetri Martin
@vonny,
"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."
Sydney Schanberg
“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life -- in firmness of mind and mastery of apetite."
-- Seneca
In short, let us pull back from being a military superpower, and become a humanitarian superpower.
Let us be a more modest nation. We will then be more secure. The modest nations of the world don't face the threat of terrorism.
Such a fundamental change in foreign policy is hardly to be expected. It would threaten too many interests: the power of political leaders, the ambitions of the military, the corporations that profit from the nation's enormous military commitments.
Change will come, as at other times in our history, only when American citizens-becoming better informed, having second thoughts after the first instinctive support for official policy-demand it. That change in citizen opinion, especially if it coincides with a pragmatic decision by the government that its violence isn't working, could bring about a retreat from the military solution.
It might also be a first step in the rethinking of our nation's role in the world. Such a rethinking contains the promise, for Americans, of genuine security, and for people elsewhere, the beginning of hope.
Howard Zinn - An honest US historian
@JTT,
I would say that he is neither honest nor historian,
“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
@spendius,
Another hypocritical vacuous Spendius assertion.
@JTT,
Do you think you are getting anywhere JT by continually blurting out that others are hypocritical without explaining why? How can we cure ourselves if we don't know what it is we are doing wrong? That quote from Zinn can be shredded in a number of different ways. It's foam from the mouth. It's Fabianism at its most cloying.
What on earth does "more modest" mean. Mr Obarmy driving himself to a summit meeting in a second-hand Skoda?
Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
- Aristotle
“Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses
"Next to the slanderer, we detest the bearer of the slander to our ears."
-- Mary Catherwood
