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No Such Thing As A True Story

In Taoism there’s a famous saying that goes, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao.” Another way you could say that, although I’ve never seen it translated this way, is “As soon as you begin to believe in something, you can no longer see anything else.”

Sunbeams

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water is too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, the schools are so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Sunbeams

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Henry Kissinger

At Hell’s Gate

A Soldier’s Journey From War To Peace

I remember the day I left for my military service. My father drove me to the bus station in Erie, Pennsylvania. I had a Boy Scout suitcase with my name written on it in black Magic Marker. My father bought me a ticket and left me there to wait for the bus. No goodbye hug, no handshake, no parting words.

The Boy Who Kissed The Soldier

In the ruins of Jenin, an old friend of mine is digging bodies out of the rubble where Israeli bulldozers have flattened houses, burying people alive. She describes the scene to me: Blackened, maggot-ridden corpses are displayed to anguished relatives for identification.

Sunbeams

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.

Robert M. Pirsig

Acts Of Faith

Philip Berrigan On The Necessity Of Nonviolent Resistance

Faith is a major component of Plowshares: You have to believe that hellish weapons are not the will of God. You have to believe that, with God’s help, you can get to these weapons. And, finally, you have to believe that you can do both symbolic and real damage to them. “Hellish weapons” means battleships that deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles; it means Aegis destroyers, B-52 bombers, and B-1 bombers; it means the whole array of nuclear first-strike weapons.

Dispatches From The Lamb’s War

Vietnam, we discovered, was not only a war on people. It was a war on the very meaning of human communication. Manipulating language was just one more means to achieve their nefarious end. Words were merely rhetorical devices, as expendable as eighteen-year-old American boys, as destructible as the Vietnamese people.