Quote: Avoiding false and dangerous notions

When former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of himself and the United Nations in 2001, he gave a remarkable speech.  In that speech delivered on December 10 — just a few short months after the World Trade Center was destroyed by extremists — he said: Each of us has [...]

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Quote: Responding to our true circumstance

This month, most U.S. colleges and universities send forth their graduating seniors into the world with high hopes and big speeches. In honor of these many momentous commencement ceremonies, I present words spoken in 1968 to a crowd of 14,000-plus college students — words that are as fitting now as they were then: You are [...]

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Quote: If and when our rights fail…

What would happen if  citizens give up on protecting their rights? Here’s a glimpse of an answer political philosopher Robert A. Dahl wrote in his On Democracy (2000, Yale University Press) reflecting on the moment Thomas Jefferson ended the Alien and Sedition Act in the late 1800s in support of the Right to Free Speech: [...]

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Quote: Who’s the better communist?

Today, while reading Richard Barbrook’s fantastic book, Imaginary Futures, I encountered this well-stated quote from a much older book, Modern Corporation and Private Property, by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means written in 1932: The communist thinks of the community in terms of a state; the corporation director thinks of it in terms of an enterprise; [...]

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