A commonplace book: an old-fashioned literary diary for recording interesting items from reading you've done. I use mine to record snippets from reading, conversation and life in general. (The early 2003 entries are from a period some years ago -- before the blog age -- when I tried an online commonplace book as a straight web page.)
Monday, June 02, 2025
Monday, March 24, 2025
Monday, February 03, 2025
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough. The vigorous expression of our American community spirit is truly important. The ancient injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is still the force that animates our faith—a faith that we are determined shall live and conquer in a world poisoned by hatred and ravaged by war.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 13, 1940
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Washington Irving on American public mind
Governed, as we are, entirely by public opinion, the utmost care should be taken to preserve the purity of the public mind. Knowledge is power, and truth is knowledge; whoever, therefore, knowingly propagates a prejudice, willfully saps the foundation of his country’s strength.
Saturday, August 20, 2022
Sunday, August 01, 2021
Popular delusions occur when appealing but baseless stories spread contagiously from one person to another. Some ideas are more virulent than others: people have been found to react most enthusiastically to narratives of fear.
Edward Chancellor, "Waiting to Deflate" New York Review (August 19, 2021)
Friday, November 27, 2020
Democracy or Globalization?
Global markets suffer from weak governance and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy…. If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance. Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong.... Even though it is possible to advance both democracy and globalization…this requires the creation of a global political community that is vastly more ambitious than anything we have seen to date or are likely to experience soon. It would call for global rule making by democracy…. Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way.
Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
Monday, January 27, 2020
Montaigne
Friday, March 22, 2019
Friday, March 01, 2019
Christophe Guilluy, quoted by James McAuley in the New York Review (March 21, 2019)
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”
EU folks talking to/about the UK on Brexit (in The New Yorker)
Sunday, November 05, 2017
Benjamin Nathans on Yuri Slezkine'd The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
See also Freud and Plato - The Politics of the Soul (Pt 1)
Monday, September 19, 2016
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Alcibiades, as quoted by Thucydides, (The History of the Peloponnesian War)
Friday, January 22, 2016
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
Monday, October 26, 2015
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
Saturday, April 05, 2014
Michael Ignatieff
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Abraham Lincoln on the effort to preserve the United States government in America's Civil War, from his First Message to Congress, July 4, 1861.