Peter Hughes > Quotes

“But the greater the violence with which these statues are removed, the greater the resentment on the part of those who see such actions as an attack on their collective identity. Populism feeds off grievance and if we refuse dialogue with those we oppose, we must accept the consequence of that refusal. They, like us, have a voice that wants to be heard. If they believe they are being denied dignity and respect, resistance and intolerance will increase.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“There is no equivalence between grief and retribution. They do not cancel each other out. They create a deepening asymmetry of grief and terror. And that is Nature's true revenge.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“Ideologies grounded in such binary distinctions between Good and Evil are, by definition, utopian and unreliable.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“Our projections make angels and demons out of people, who stand as proxies for the emotions we might otherwise be incapable or expressing. And when an angel dies, we are overwhelmed with grief, not just, or even primarily, for the one who has dies, but for ourselves.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“Statues bear witness to truth. Before they can stand, two spaces must be cleared: a space in a park, a street, a square or a building, and a space in the minds of the people. The first is easy to find. The second is hard to sustain.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“When economic growth stalls and people lose faith in the future, they will invest the present with intolerance and violence.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“Long after dangerous enemies had been purged, the logic of fear demanded and endless supply of enemies, each of whom found their individual differences compressed into a single category: Traitors.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“Chaos overwhelms revolutionary movements because they overestimate their ability to control the consequences of their actions.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues

“As the gulf between the educated elite and the mass of ordinary Americans widens, the hope for civility declines. The top 1 per cent send more of their children to elite American universities than the bottom 60 per cent. They emerge from these universities with contempt for the social conservatism of large swathes of working-class America whose fury found a voice in a president who told them, 'I love the poorly educated!' This dynamic of love and hate, fueled by identity groups that no longer understand each other, creates digital echo chambers where we speak only to those who speak like us. The first casualty of these chambers is any possibility of shared truth, and without this truth the centre cannot hold.”
― Peter Hughes, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues