»Die Ethik, auf die Geschichte angewendet, ist die Lehre von der Revolution.«  ~Walter Benjamin. (Ethics, applied to history, is the theory of revolution.)

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come e', bisogna che tutto cambi." "If we want that everything remains the way it is, everything must change."  Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo. 1958.

"What we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us." ~ Marcel Proust

There is no break, let alone opposition, between local history and global history. What the experience of an individual, a group, a space allows us to comprehend is a particular modulation or inflection of global history.  —Jacques Revel, 1996

This generation born in war, born in the jail cells of the South, born at the Pentagon march, watches in disbelief as the country is paved over, malls replacing corn fields, synthetic food replacing corn, cash replacing value. What has become of us? Is the country brain dead? Is this what we have done with our freedom? Our greatest surviving value is greed. Is that what our legacy will be? What shall we tell the children? Occupy LA, Demonstration Poster. Broadway Downtown, 2011.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face. George Orwell.

'When the whites came to our country, we had the land and they had the Bible, now we have the Bible and they have the land.” Unknown African source.

"The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means."  Whisky Sisodia, in Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

The future ain't what it used to be. Yogi Berra

“Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different, will voluntarily go into a psychiatric hospital.” Nietzsche: Thus spoke Zarathustra, Introduction.

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes

'The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. Paul Virilio

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. T.S. Eliot

Horses are the survivors of the age of heroes. ~ Adorno