Jack Burden: “what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost.”
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Tags:bad·Evil·Good·History·Humanism·morality·philosophy
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
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Tags:History·leadership·Politics·Psychology·sociology·war·WW1
The politics of grievance can be harsh and it is never easy moderating a group where the sole focus is immigration. But immigration, like crime, like welfare abuse, is not an issue we can avoid; we must deal with it head on. Not just because of the sense of unfairness that people hold but also […]
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Tags:Democracy·Focus Groups·Immigration·Labour·policy·Politics·Refugees
We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is […]
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Tags:Ideology·means and ends·morality·morality plays·Politics·progressive·progressive politics
In every such case there is a conclusion which is perfectly plain but which can only be drawn if one is privately disloyal to the official ideology. The normal response is to push the question, unanswered, into a corner of one’s mind, and then continue repeating contradictory catchwords.
The necessity to entertain could sometimes be the enemy of learning, but not as often as the deadly freedom to write as if nobody would ever read the results except a faculty supervisor who owed his post to the same exemption.
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Modern history had given us enough warning against treating simplifications as real. The totalitarian states, the great sponsors of mass atrocity against innocent human beings, had been propelled by ideologies, and what else was an ideology except a premature synthesis?
Do I contradict myself?” asked Walt Whitman. “Very well, I contradict myself,” he sang defiantly. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Every artist contains multitudes. Graham Greene is a Roman Catholic, a partisan of Rome, if you like. Why then does he write so compulsively about bad, doubtful and doubting priests? Because a genuine artist, […]
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Tags:art·Complexity·contradiction·literature·Oppression·power·truth
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together,
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Tags:literature·People
Citing T.S. Eliot: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
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Tags:idealism·Ideology·policy·Politics·pragmatism·Principles