Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe.
That’s why war – explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy – must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it’s because some high-level hedgehog – a Xerxes, or a Napoleon – has fallen in love with war, making it an end in itself. They’ll stop only when they’ve bled themselves bloodless. And so the culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test, from 1936, for a first-rate intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, “are very rare.” More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations – or foresight from fear.
Most asteroids, like most politicians, give off more heat than light.
To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.
Wordsworth once wrote of ‘spots of time’, experiences so intense they expand and inform existence ever after. They have a ‘renovating virtue’.
I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.
And I wonder, is it really so difficult to enter, in some slight degree, into the mind-frame of an animal? Are we not all beasts?
Despite all the seen and unseen motion of summer, there is a stillness in the landscape, as though it was trapped in a glass jar.
And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.
Finally, when historians contest interpretations of the past among themselves, they’re liberating it in yet another sense: from the possibility that there can be only a single valid explanation of what happened.
Learning about the past liberates the learner from oppressions earlier constructions of the past have imposed upon them.
Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.
But we must accept one central truth and responsibility as participants in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.
It is the responsibility, yet the individual choice, of each of us to use the light we have to dispel the work of darkness, because if we do not, the power of falsehood rises. Through our inaction it becomes stronger, and a more potent force. It can even lead to the dimming of the light of all humanity born on this planet. That is why we struggle. That is why we fight to contribute to the confirmation of what is good, to seal our compact with love within our own lives and within our world.
Political parties are on the hunt to search and destroy each other, as though we were involved in some kind of enemy combat, rather than the work of statesmanship.
It is important for upcoming activists to study American history, as well as political and philosophical thought. It is unlikely that what you hope to accomplish is new. Current activism is almost always linked to the history of revolution worldwide, and Americans have a special connection to this legacy because our nation was born out of the struggle against tyranny.
Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.