{"quotes":[{"text":"A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that 'we' are all agreed on 'our' interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ('our sensibilities are enraged...') Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron 'Maulana' Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called 'US.' Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was 'Wherever US is, We are.' It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["deceit","language","politics","populism","surveillance"],"id":14054,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than 'politicians' think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["crowd-sourcing","elitism","intellectualism","politics","populism"],"id":91849,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart people. Welcome to the new Dark Ages!","author":"Oliver Gaspirtz","tags":["bad-choices","dark-ages","democracy","democrats","election","election-2016","elections","hillary","hillary-clinton","homophobia","immigration","misogyny","nativism","politics","populism","racism","republicans","trump","trump-popularity-explained","voting"],"id":94669,"author_id":"Oliver+Gaspirtz"},{"text":"You English,' said Steenhold.'You Americans,' said Rud.'When you aren't as fresh as paint,' he said, 'you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I'm amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sort of things you can still take seriously as Presidential Candidates. These leonine reverberators tossing their manes back in order to keep their eyes on the White House -- they belong to the Pleistocene. We dropped that sort of head in England after John Bright. When the Revolution is over and I retire, I shall retire as Hitler did, to some remote hunting-lodge, and we'll have the heads of Great Labour Leaders and Presidential Hopes stuck all round the Hall. Hippopotami won't be in it.","author":"H.G. Wells","tags":["government","politicians","politics","populism"],"id":98281,"author_id":"H.G.+Wells"},{"text":"Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["buddhism","humble","islam","populism","prince"],"id":101224,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"They call me a tyrant . . . One arrives at a tyrant's throne by the help of scoundrels . . . What faction do I belong to? You yourselves. What is that faction which, since the Revolution began, has crushed the factions and swept away hireling traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles of the Revolution. ","author":"Maximilien de Robespierre","tags":["execution","french-revolution","guillotine","martyrdom","populism","revolution"],"id":103220,"author_id":"Maximilien+de+Robespierre"},{"text":"If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.","author":"John Cage","tags":["acceptance","avant-garde","modernism","novelty","populism"],"id":126612,"author_id":"John+Cage"},{"text":"Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["apartheid","apoliticism","argument","atheism","berlin","bought-priesthood","cape-coloureds","cold-war","communism","conviction","critical-thinking","enlightenment","euphemism","eurocentricism","faith","film","george-hw-bush","george-orwell","german-people","germany","groupthink","hedonism","humanism","individualism","irony","journalism","left-wing-politics","lies","literary-criticism","literature","los-angeles","margaret-thatcher","monotheism","munich","orthodoxy","personality-politics","politics","polytheism","populism","postmodernism","potus","progress","radical-politics","religion","right-wing-politics","ronald-reagan","russia","science","sectarianism","self-love","self-pity","socialism","solipsism","south-africa","soviet-union","thomas-mann","totalitarianism","tribalism","truth","united-states","xhosa-people","zulu-people"],"id":151951,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.', February 25, 1933].","author":"Cyril Connolly","tags":["faithfulness","popularity","populism","principles","standards","writing"],"id":152107,"author_id":"Cyril+Connolly"},{"text":"It's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences and/or ridicule.","author":"A.E. Samaan","tags":["first-amendment","first-amendment-rights","free-speech-movement","free-speech-rights","freedom-of-speech","libertarian","libertarianism","populism"],"id":206454,"author_id":"A.E.+Samaan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":20,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}