A Quote by Vernon Howard
Cruelty practiced as a matter of social principle or public policy, and presented to the community as a means to a higher goal is the most obscene and decadent phenomenon of any civilization.
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The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government.
If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.
We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.
Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human conditions which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal.
The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism.
Much of what's called 'public' is increasingly a private good paid for by users - ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.
I think all musicians and producers, they know the real goal is to come up with a record that is entertaining and not boring, that's the goal. I think if everyone agrees that that's the goal then it doesn't matter who's the band and it doesn't matter who's the producer. It just means that that you try to realise the ambition no matter what the situation is or who the people are.
Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.
I have been offered obscene amounts to do commercials and stage shows abroad, but as a matter of principle, I am against them.
If the government were to invest that money in higher education and public services, these would be far better investments. But administrators and academics in the U.S. for the most part don't make these arguments; instead they have retreated from defending the university as a citadel of public values and in doing so have abdicated any sense of social responsibility to the idea of the university as a site of inspired by the search for truth, justice, freedom, and dignity.
Self-discipline leads to higher spiritual states only if practiced with under- standing. The clearer the goal, the greater the result.
You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable.
Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.
I mean, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the Black Lives Movement, it's very difficult to, in a sense, especially since the 1980s, to talk about what the social contract is and what it means, and what it means to celebrate public goods, what it means to make, create social investments.
I'm opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.
But, that’s the whole point of corporatization - to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run - which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything - are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public.
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