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Letter To The President

The American system is intended to find the candidate who most wants to be president. The parliamentary system elects the most qualified candidate; the American system elects the most ambitious one.

November 1992

Without A Name For You

Hannah Arendt says a fundamental contradiction of the United States is political freedom coupled with social slavery.

My Campaign Diary

I run for president the same way. Every few weeks, I go to St. Mark’s Church (a half block from my house), mimeograph leaflets, and stick some in my attache case. Whenever it comes up in a conversation that I’m running for president, I take one out.

When The Bough Breaks

When we finally reach the street, it’s like moving into the current of a mighty river. We pass the White House, the Treasury, the Justice Department, all the cornerstones of empire that remind us this is Washington, where decisions are made that affect everyone, the way one careless moment, one broken promise — one broken condom — can affect your whole life.

Sunbeams

You cannot have both civilization and truth.

Iris Murdoch

Why Schools Don’t Educate

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and others to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

Enemies Of Freedom

Literal-Mindedness And Its Cure

For about fifteen minutes every day I worry about AIDS or herpes or Pentagon cost overruns. It’s not that they have any great effect on me, it’s just that I am a broad-based, categorical worrier.

Thoughts On Censorship

What is true for a person, in other words, is not true for a republic; from our private life we can, like a dictator, ban anything which offends us; but in our life as a citizen in a democracy not only can we not ban from the public realm that which offends us, but for our own protection we must fight for its right to exist.

The Real Power