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
Generics
“If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”
-Hannah Arendt, 1951. (The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace. Pg. 300)
Sincerely yours…
“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit…has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticisim which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are…one response has been…a retreat from the discipline requires required by the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns towards trying to provide honest representations of himself…he devotes himself to being true to his own nature…But it is preposterous to imagine we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves without knowing them…sincerity itself in bullshit”
-Harry Frankfurt, 2005 (On Bullshit. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 64-7)
Surprise!
“If it is really true…that what makes us human is above all our capacity to make history, and if history consists of actions that could not have been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human would then be to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them. Their humanity is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us”
-David Graeber, 2007 (Lost People. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Pg 388)
