Independence
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”
-Frederick Douglass, 1852 - Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York
Theory of volume
“Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, on ‘Danger in the Voice’, 1887 (The Gay Science. New York: Vintage. Pg 210)
Critical Pens
“The echo is heard immediately: but always as a ‘critique’…The work never produces an effect but only another’ critique ; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique…At bottom, however, everything remains as it was…The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action…But their critical pens never cease to flow, for the have lost control of them, and instead of directing them are directed by them. It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings…that the modern personality betrays its weakness”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Untimely Meditations. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1983)
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