Jeff

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.'

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger.”
― Jac Jemc, The Grip of It

“Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.”
― James Howe

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise