Many are observing Ferguson and witnessing the anger, demonstrations, looting and vandalism and calling for quiet. But quiet isn’t enough. The absence of noise isn’t the presence of justice – and we must demand justice in Ferguson and the other ‘Fergusons’ around America.
Other
The biggest road block to action on genocide and other human rights crimes is ignorance. Most people just don’t know that such things are happening, and often, if they have a vague idea they are happening, there is a feeling that there is nothing that can be done to stop these crimes.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.
The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.
The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.
Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.
We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.
I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.
I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word – for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.