"There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted."

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“Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.”

“Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.”

“When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin... in the dust, in the cool tombs.”

“Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work — I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now?”

“The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches, and then moves on.”

“Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The great world to which I am native has long ago outgrown the myths, the toys, the bogies of your infant world. There, one lives without the fear of death and pain, though there one dies and suffers.…"

— Olaf Stapledon

Literature1886–1950

#death

"Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncin…"

— Bernard Lewis

Politics1916–2018

#change

"At the beginning of each semester, I tell students that my economic theory course will deal with positive, non-normative economic theory. I also tell them that if they hear me making a normative state…"

— Walter E. Williams

Economics1936–2020

#truth

"There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they …"

— Paul Krugman

Economics1953

#justice