Excerpts

"los nasz dla was przestrogą" (let our fate be your warning) Mausoleum Inscription

"historian Kolleen Guy suggests that the legendary French terroir that one supposedly detects in a taste of good Bordeaux or brie was in act the relatively recent concoction of an opportunistic alliance among nationalist politicians, ambitious growers, and tourist chateau operators all seeking to serve their narrow economic intrersts while stifling the competition from seemingly less "authentic" locales" Warren Belasco

"Civilization is a multiplicity of strategies, dazzling as precious gems inlaid in a golden crown, to obscure from human beings the sound of, the terrible meaning of, their jaws grinding. The meaning of man's place in the food cycle that, by way of our imaginations, we had imagined might not apply to us" Joyce Carol Oates

"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.” David Foster Wallace

"Nevertheless, by common consent, the extremely imprecise problem "Why is there no socalism in the United States?" has been reduced to a discrete set of questions. It does not mean "Why has the United States not become a socialist nation?" or even "Why is there no revolutionary labor or polititcal movement?" Rather, the problem is generally defined as the absence in the United States of a large avowedly social democratic political party like the Labour party of Britain, the French Socialist party, and the Communist party of Italy. From the strength of such parties, moreover, American writers generally infer a mass socialist consciousness among the working classes of these countries. Thus, "Why is there no socialism?" really means "Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist nation whose political system lacks a social democratic presence and whose working class lacks socialist class consciousness?"" Eric Foner

“Not the most beautiful haiku the waves/ Have ever whispered to the beach/ Nor the first jasmine-scented sunbeams/ Of spring warming bared skin and pavement/ … can nigh compare with the immensity of my love/ ...For you at this moment.” Jenny Filipetti

"Egypt has finally dumped its arrogant, paternalistic dictator of three decades in the largest country in the Arab world. That's quite an achievement for a suppressive police state after only two to three weeks of protests that weren't very organized to begin with. But what comes next? Will pure democracy just kind of "appear"? ... Even though the military rule will only be in place during a transitional process leading up to the next election, there's always the possibility that the military's top general could change his mind and start thinking, "Maybe I will just not ever cede power and rule the country myself, forever, with all of my weapons."" Jim Newell

"Like tourists, contemporary writers must be wary of the “superficial mysticism, sentimentalism, and loss of critical faculties” which are an occupational hazard when we are connecting with something larger than ourselves. Is Thoreau’s “vital and intense sense of connection to nature” possible in a skeptical postmodern era? Anyone who can avoid a certain romanticism in the Grand Canyon is probably hopeless." James E. Young

"The sunken fountain is not the memorial at all. It is only history turned into a pedestal, an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found” Horst Hoheisel

"[anarchism] is primarily an ethics of practice. it insists, before anything else, that one's means must be consonant with one's ends; that one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; that, as much as possible, one must embody the society one wishes to create." david graeber.