LAURA INGALLS WILDER
Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.
Sunday, June 29, 2025
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BENJAMIN CARTER HETT
The Death of Democracy
Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people?
German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they-have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary-he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.
Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.
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Saturday, June 28, 2025
ALEXEI NAVALNY
A huge number of people are either forced to act like cowards or act like cowards without being forced or even asked to. They just look the other way and try to ignore what is happening.
For all of us, the moment will come when we will realize that none of the things we achieved by looking the other way and keeping quiet mattered.
The only moments that matter in life are the moments when we're doing the right thing. When we don't have to look the other way, when we can raise our eyes from the floor and look each other in the eye. Nothing else matters.
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THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
Right understanding
Right thought
Right speech
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right mindfulness
Right concentration
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Friday, June 27, 2025
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BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY
“Big Friday”
You saved me from melting, baby
You saved me from stinging and being holed up
And braking in snow and killing more
And overspilling my runneth cup
You had light in your hands and your eyes closed
You had movement out of my sight
You wore no shoes and ate like a leopard
And slept with your legs apart every night
And if I had to live
This is what it should be
To have such a woman with me
When tidal wave hit and our house was in splinters
I thought you had took all you had to take
But you snuggled to me on the ground in the winter
And your breath smelled like honey in the frosty air wake
And if I had to live
This is what it should be
To have such a woman with me
Thursday, June 26, 2025
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JORGE LUIS BORGES
The image that I shall leave when I’m dead — we’ve already said that this is part of a poet’s works — and maybe the most important — I don’t know exactly what it will be, I don’t know if I’ll be viewed with indulgence, with indifference, or with hostility. Of course, that’s of little importance to me now; what does matter to me is not what I’ve written but what I am writing and what I’m going to write. And I think this is how every writer feels.
Alfonso Reyes said that one published what he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2025
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Tuesday, June 24, 2025
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Monday, June 23, 2025
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Sunday, June 22, 2025
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MARJANE SATRAPI
If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly.
The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.
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Saturday, June 21, 2025
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ANNE CARSON
"My Religion"
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.
When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves.
I had a vision
of all the people in the world
who are searching for God
massed in a room
on one side
of a partition
that looks
from the other side
(God’s side)
transparent
but we are blind.
Our gestures are blind.
Our blind gestures continue
for some time until finally
from somewhere
on the other side of the partition there we are
looking back at them.
It is far too late.
We see how brokenly
how warily
how ill
our blind gestures
parodied
what God really wanted
(some simple thing)
The thought of it
(this simple thing)
is like a creature
let loose in a room
and battering
to get out.
It batters my soul
with its rifle butt.
Friday, June 20, 2025
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Thursday, June 19, 2025
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GUY DEBORD
Society of the Spectacle
Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has become conservative (the family, property, the moral order, the nation), reuniting the petty-bourgeoisie and the unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by the impotence of socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological.
It presents itself as it is: a violent resurrection of myth which demands participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the leader.
Fascism is technically-equipped archaism. Its decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. Thus it is one of the factors in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in destruction... makes it one of the fundamental forces of present-day society.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2025
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