December, 2003

One of the most consistent reactions in politics is the unholy uproar that follows whenever you try to take away special privileges. Makes no difference how obvious the unfairness is, those who have been favored over others by the system inevitably feel entitled to that favoritism. It is theirs by right, by heritage, tradition, and divine providence, and if you try to take it away, you are in for the fight of your life. The underprivileged in this country can still raise a fair political stink on occasion, but it is nothing compared to the titanic stench that erupts when the overprivileged are invited onto a level playing field.
–– Molly Ivins, in Shrub, The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.

November, 2003

From the column Curmudgeon, in The Funny Times, November 2003, V. 18, Issue 11, p.12.

October, 2003

Clever men are the tools with which bad men work. The march of sophistry is devious: the march of power is one. Its means, its tools, its pretexts are various, and borrowed like the hues of the chameleon from any object that happens to be at hand. Its object is ever the same, and deadly as the serpent's fang. It moves on to its end with crested majesty: erect, silent, with eyes sunk and fixed, undiverted by fear, unabashed by shame; and puny orators and patriot mountebanks play tricks before it to amuse the crowd, till it crushes the world in its monstrous folds.

William Hazlitt's description of George Canning (Cited by Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, May 2, 1987)

September, 2003

I am done with great things and big things, with great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.                                 William James