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Don't know much about history | 33 comments (33 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: Don't know much about history (4.00 / 2)
"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." (Thomas Jefferson)

and perhaps my all-time favorite quote ever:

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself.  Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.  If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."  (Thomas Jefferson)

by sgr2 on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 07:01:57 AM EST
Re: Don't know much about history (4.00 / 2)
jefferson is one hero to me too, warts forgiven.

those quotes are priceless too, as befits a philosopher-king.

with all the wise warnings we have had in plain sight, and the stirrings of intuition that the system is so seriously fucked up as to have made a crapshoot of some fine thing that should and could be honoured, instead of betrayed.

we just have to find our truths the hard way usually, but it's always worth trying to make it easier!

hopefully it's incremental, and we can eventually tip the scales back into balance, grain by grain.

thanks for your posts, folks, i couldn't think of what to say as a seed comment, the quotes had bereft me of words... how can we say again what has been said so elegantly already?

i keep hoping we will find a magic lever to lift off the burden of ignorance that keeps us acting against our own species' interests, how did we get so dumb?

descarte's split vision?

 

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 07:24:10 AM EST
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Re: Don't know much about history (4.00 / 2)
Well we all got warts of one sort or another, and Jefferson is no different. I'm not sure that at all times his actions and deeds were such that I'd want to think of him as one of my heros, but the words he spoke about "independent thinking" to arrive at the right choice, rather than being committed to certain ideas without thought, always made sense to me.
by sgr2 on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 10:01:13 AM EST
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Re: Don't know much about history (none / 0)
he impressed me with his vision of a nation of small farms connected by canalways.

if only... :)


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 12:52:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Don't know much about history (4.00 / 4)
And yet the Louisiana Purchase guaranteed that the Pioneer System of farming as a capitalist investment of sweat equity in pursuit of capital gain would face no natural boundary until the Pioneer had swept across the continent from ocean to ocean like some kind of slow motion but inexorable wildfire.

And that system, along with its inevitable near genocide of the original nations of North America, is reckoned the better of the two political economies that the Louisiana Purchase helped sustain.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 11:29:59 PM EST
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Re: Don't know much about history (4.00 / 2)
It was a rolling genocide, it is just that it was not total. And over and over nations were given the choice of abandoning their culture and language or loosing their lives.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 08:27:13 PM EST
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Re: Don't know much about history (none / 0)
And that's a bad thing?

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!
by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Fri Apr 20th, 2012 at 08:56:27 PM EST
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Don't know much about history | 33 comments (33 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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